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Live review: Bill Callahan at the Parish
“Hello.”
No “I’m Bill Callahan” (the musician formerly known as Smog). No “It’s great to be back home in Austin” (after a monthlong tour in support of the album “Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle”). No “Thanks to all my friends for coming out” (among them, Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris of Shearwater, who’ve played with Callahan in various incarnations).
Just “hello,” and then straight into “Our Anniversary,” a long and winding relationship narrative from the album “Supper,” nuanced by sentimental but not sappy violin and cello strings during Sunday night’s jackpot set at the Parish. Callahan has let his songs do the talking for him for 13 albums now. His oeuvre can stand toe to toe with the best in the singer-songwriter game. This is especially true of his three most recent albums, which include the baptism-by-fire “Woke on a Whaleheart” and the autobiographical rite-of-passage “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love.”
It was quite like Christmas morning when you are 5, then, when Callahan followed his opener with “Diamond Dancer” and “Sycamore,” the sublime back-to-back combo from “Whaleheart.” “Dancer” was faster than usual, the sight of one of those hippie chicks at a Dead show twirling into infinity hard to ignore. “Sycamore,” meanwhile, was slower than usual, with Callahan’s drawn-out enunciation of the word “sycamore” invoking more meaning than an entire Leonard Cohen poem.
Callahan and his four backing players also performed songs from the new album, including “Eid Ma Clack Shaw,” a song made memorable not only by its title (no amount of Google-searching yields a translation) but by its refrain, “Show me the way, show me the way, show me the way, to shake a mem-o-ry,” which was sung by Callahan while plinking a keyboard and wearing sunglasses to shield him from the overhead lights.
With the room finally dimmed near darkness, Callahan went all the way back to 1995, with a cryptic, unfurling version of the song “Bathysphere,” about living in the spherical deep-sea vessel. The song was covered in ‘96 by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), who, it’s said, was Callahan’s girlfriend, until, of course, one of them said goodbye.
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