Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Please don't feel that you're not intelligent if you don't like this ...

Please, allow me to indulge myself for a moment, as I nearly couldn’t bring myself to listen to open the door more than a crack here on Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, and not because the album’s title is grammatically incorrect, though perhaps the intent was to bestow the notion of two people becoming one thing, but because of the leadoff track “Jim Cain.” This number moves at a lonely slow dark pace, nearly that of a funeral dirge, where Callahan talks over the song using his most haunting deep voice, a song that is purposely designed to pluck at listener’s heartstrings for no good reason other that to instill a sense of sadness and weary foreboding. It’s not that I don’t give sad songs permission to effect and affect me, it’s just that songs such as this are designed to drag me down into the muck and touch the actual physical pain of another human being, which that is not something I wish someone to show me, unless of course, I’ve been asked first … even then, this is not an emancipated vision that causes a connection, such as “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division did. This is music to keep one at arms length, pure indulgence that reminds me of those silly emotional numbers from the 60’s, “Wichita Lineman” and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.”

As to the rest of the album, while it’s not as impending as “Jim Cain,” I can’t imagine who’d want to play this album alone by themselves, yet alone play it for anyone else, or even set an atmosphere of such inward introspection to spin in the background, as the record certainly doesn’t set the mood for anything other than self loathing, where one wishes to feel one’s own pain even more acutely, wondering why in the world one’s life has managed to detour its way so wrongly.

Ah … but maybe that’s it, this is and album of introspection, a self-portrait of textures and ambivalence without a sense of immediacy, not even the tearing up of everything, more, the final exposure on a roll of film that’s half there, a half memory forever kept, the shadow in the foreground, where one begins to jealously wonder who it was that took a picture of an old lover.
Of course, when a healthy mind reaches this stage in life, and we all have been there, faced with the terrifying knowledge that we know far less about ourselves and the world than we ever thought we did, a healthy mind reshuffles the deck and starts over, though Callahan is intent on not only keeping this pain alive by picking at the scab to keep the wound eternally fresh, while ing his emotional distress on to listeners, where they now have a focal point for their own ambivalence, where perhaps to this dark imposing atmospheric background, they take an even more deeply regraded step into the tragedy of their own misery.

And as to Bill Callahan, he’s not started over, he’s merely found a way of holding onto his emotional heartache, secretly enjoying his perplexity, his vexation, his suggestion that he may just commit suicide, his angst, never requesting a bandaid, more content to see the blood, than to allow healing.

There are those who will want you to believe that Callahan is channelling the ghost of Leonard Cohen, but the world doesn’t need another Leonard Cohen, where I often wonder if we needed one in the first place. This is not a deeply literary-minded record of hard knocks, Bill Callahan is not Jim Cain, he’s merely become the overt model for every sad man whoever walked the planet and new how to play an instrument … it’s all so tiresome and laborious.

Review by Jenell Kesler