And we’re coming out of dreams/ As we’re coming back to dreams”, Bill Callahan sings in the first song of his new album. The dream has long been a central motif in the work of the American songwriter. Yes, he often uses the word “dream” interchangeably with “song” in interviews, album titles and songs. However, his masterpiece Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest (2019) seemed like an awakening. In those songs wrested from a writing crisis, he did not tell laconic, surreal stories/dreams, but rather from (his own) life – he sang about birth, love and death.
On the follow-up, “Gold Record” (2020), he withdrew again, but these songs also had a new depth, wrested from life. The title of the new album is a reflection of the word “reality”. According to Callahan, the twelve songs are an attempt to reacquaint yourself with the basic things in life after years in a (pandemic) state of emergency.
Like scattered shards of a mirror
The album describes a long day’s journey into the night, beginning at dawn with the children stepping out of the shadows of the hallway and ending with nightfall, the planets singing in the sky and the last guest of a party – “we thought he’d never leave”. Callahan sings of inspiration (“I feel something coming on – a disease or a song”) and dreams that haunt you beyond sleep, of being expelled from paradise, of the mother who passes away and remains in the bardo to make sure the grandson is okay, from fatherly joys and God, escapism and religious fanaticism, coyotes, bugs, pigs and horses.
He breaks up the sparseness of the last albums in places. Apocalyptic trumpets, distorted guitars, drones and wispy organs have just as much space as female harmony vocals, filigree acoustic picking and the piano dripping like morning dew. Like scattered shards of a mirror, these songs show numerous reflections of reality – we see the lived, the thought and the dreamed, the inner world of the outer world of the inner world. “They say never wake a dreamer,” Callahan sings. “Maybe that’s how we die/ I realize now that dreams are real.”
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