Clearing the smog to let the music shine through

‘I can’t think of anything that isn’t universal in this world,” singer-songwriter Bill Callahan says about the myriad of subjects that find their way into his beguiling songs. “I wake up with music resting on my chest, like a cat that likes to sleep there. And its eyes are open before mine, just waiting for me to wake.”

Callahan entered the music world through the back door in 1992 as Smog—and occasionally as the deconstructed “(Smog)”—creating home-recorded epics of love and isolation. This past year, however, he issued his first album, Woke on a Whaleheart, under his own name.

“I’d used the name Smog for 15 years. It started to feel a little crazy, monomaniacal, like The Rolling Stones. Why not strip it away? I don’t think the music has changed. You’re always circling the room, trying to write from different perspectives and maybe talk to different people with different songs.”

His work as Smog often bore the patina of an artist’s lonely pursuit of his muse, epitomized by his homage to the Purple One in “Prince Alone in the Studio” on 1995’s Wild Love.

Whaleheart opens the windows and lets the world in. “I came to realize that I had been dabbling in white witchery; making my own passion plays on stage and in the studio. It’s not a bad racket but I just decided to walk around to the other side of the hill to watch the crucifixion from there. Turns out I found a big, tented hall filled with food, booze and people. A bouncer will throw me out soon enough.”

Woke on a Whaleheart landed on many critics’ lists as one of the finest albums of 2007, so Callahan may just get to spend as much time in the light as he wants. myspace.com/toomuchtolove

Woke on a Whaleheart is available on Drag City records.