11 May 2026
Bill Callahan played Union Stage last Monday in Washington, DC in support of his excellent album My Days of 58, and kept the sold-out crowd enraptured for nearly two hours, as he showcased songs from his new record, as well as choice cuts from his storied discography, including three classic Smog tracks.
I’ve been a huge fan of Bill Callahan for a long time now and consider him one of the greatest living American songwriters.
He is a storyteller in the truest sense, and has an uncanny knack to be both wonderfully witty and sincerely earnest, and often in the same sentence. Even before dropping his Smog moniker twenty years ago, he was tapping into a wellspring of clear poetry and introspection in his music, but it seems like the older and wiser he gets, the more straight to the heart like a quiet bullet his musical vision has become.
Lyrically, I don’t think there’s any other artist who has filled my head with more narrative vignettes and ideas and images of nature than he has. And in many ways, I think My Days of 58 may be the best album of his career.
Callahan is a decade older than me, but we have many commonalities — we’re Dad’s to a boy and a girl, we’ve both lost a parent, his are both gone now, while I’m still mourning and learning to live with absence after the death of my Mom. Check out the song “Empathy” for his take on being a parent. It’s a good one. Also, we’re both cynics who still keep a dogged optimism, and as he says in “Stepping Out For Air”, have learned “to see beauty in the gray”. And we’re both incredibly handsome silver foxes with an acerbic yet very charming wit lol.
But geez, enough of my BC fanboy-ing. I’ll have to dedicate a whole post to his work later. Let’s review that show, shall we?
It began with My Days of 58 opener, “Why Do Men Sing?” which is a fantastic song, but there were some sound issues at the start, I don’t think they could hear out of their monitors, and so the song was unfortunately a bit sloppy until it was almost over. Thankfully, by the next track, “The Man I’m Supposed To Be”, the band seemed locked in and everything was clicking.
Matt Kinsey on lead guitar was an understated and perfect accompaniment to Callahan’s subdued strumming. Dustin Laurenzi added flourish with sax and clarinet, and absolute legend, Jim White (of Dirty Three fame), was deep in the percussive pocket, and it was a treat for me to see him behind a kit again (I saw Dirty Three multiple times in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and was always impressed).
I would have loved to have also had someone tinkling on piano, and Eve Searls to be singing her warm backing vocals on tracks like “Lonely City”, “Lake Winnebago”, and “Why Do Men Sing?”, but Callahan and his band still did a fantastic job of bringing his music to life.
At about the half way point of the set, they played “Riding for the Feeling” from Apocalypse, and those opening minor chords, coupled with Bill’s gravelly baritone saying “It’s never easy to say goodbye”, made me think of my Mom, and an emotional wave hit me. As the song played out, I had the cathartic moment I was expecting, wiping tears from my cheeks with a smile on my face. And what else do you want from a live show? To laugh, to smile, to cry, to think about the people you love, to be moved, and to feel fortunate to be part of this collective IRL moment of a modest musical legend just doing his thang, playing some songs on a Monday night.
Thanks Bill.
INAUDIBLE 