The title My Days of 58 sounds like it belongs on the spine of a slim, sun‑faded memoir, something labored over by a man who’s finally ready to decide what mattered and what didn’t. In Bill Callahan’s case, it arrived a lot more casually than that. The phrase arrived courtesy of his 10‑year‑old son, Bass, who wandered in while Callahan was working and wanted to know what the new record was called. When his dad admitted he didn’t have a name yet, Bass took it upon himself to solve the dilemma. “He was like, ‘Uhhhhh, how old are you?’ ‘58.’ ‘How about My Days of 58?’” Callahan remembers. It stuck.
That mix—offhand and oddly weighty at the same time—is what the album sounds like, too. These songs are full of very ordinary specifics: a missed father-daughter dance because of a broken toe; a girl at a show in East Tenessee; a chili spoon taken on a honeymoon. Around those details, the record folds in bigger, stranger concerns. Opener “Why Do Men Sing?” starts with a dream that Callahan is “gonna die” and a spirit guide leading him to safety, then it drops him in front of a white‑clad Lou Reed who tells him to “let it ride / into a dwarf star or a black hole or someone else’s soul.” “And Dream Land” imagines cars passing in the rain “driven by my dead.” “Lake Winnebago” goes to Wisconsin, where “death is a hazy horizon,” and turns the lake where Callahan buried his parents into a possible place to lay his own dreams to rest. The scale keeps slipping between close‑up domestic scenes to dreamlike realms and mortal fears and back again, but the voice stays grounded, conversational, almost stubbornly human throughout.
When we talk, Callahan keeps returning to that humanness, and to how you protect it. He’s thinking about it in spiritual terms, yes, but in practical ones, too: how to make a “living room record” that feels like a band playing in the same space, mistakes and all, at a time when technology keeps offering more ways to smooth the rough edges out. On “Computer,” a grim ode to life in a digital age, he watches his own worst instincts spill out online—“I use my computer to pass the time / Search for whatever crosses my mind / It really brings out the worst in me!”—and worries about a future where we’re “satisfied being sung to by something without a spirit / Until the human voice sounds so flawed and raw that we just quit it.” “We’re supposed to interact with the world,” he says at one point, shaking his head at the thought of sitting back and letting AI make art for us. “We’re not supposed to be passive.” My Days of 58 keeps trying to move in the other direction: toward effort, toward risk, toward whatever messy thing happens when you don’t hand the hard parts over to a system or a persona. It’s anti-stasis; an album about change and what it leaves in its wake. Change, after all, is what makes us human; “passivity,” Callahan tells me, “is just death.”
Callahan’s been writing about death long enough that no one could mistake it for a new theme. Earlier in his career, he sang about his own funeral with a crooked grin; more recent records have woven questions of aging, family, and loss into their everyday scenery, letting mortality sit at the table without announcing itself as the guest of honor. What’s different now is the proximity. In the years leading up to My Days of 58, Callahan lost both of his parents and was treated for colon cancer, including surgery to remove a tumor—a stretch of time that explicitly turned mortality from a lyric subject into a medical reality. My Days of 58 rarely names any of that directly, but it doesn’t really need to. Instead, the album keeps circling a theme first posited in the “The Man I’m Supposed to Be”—“Now my biggest fear is not the dying / My biggest fear is that I’ll stop trying”—and treating it less like a dramatic flourish than an operating principle. When he sings “From now on, I start living my life / As if the next day I’ll be dead,” it doesn’t feel like a hashtag-YOLO fantasy of fearlessness, but like someone talking themselves into actually inhabiting their own life before it’s too late.
Perhaps for that reason, it seems Callahan doesn’t necessarily trust his old narrators—or, at least, his old way of narrating—anymore. When I ask whether his approach to albums has shifted over time, he admits a lot of earlier songs were, in his own words, filled with “fake it till you make it” positivity. They described a person he hoped to grow into rather than the one who actually existed. At some point—a remarkably recent point, actually; sometime after his previous album, 2022’s YTI⅃AƎЯ—he began to feel he’d “painted a picture of myself that wasn’t accurate and maybe making myself look too good,” and that realization hangs over this record. My Days of 58 is, in this sense, a clarification: less invested in the myth of Bill Callahan, capital B and C, more interested in the fallible man who messes up, goes to therapy, worries he hasn’t really been honest with anyone—himself very much included—and then tries, belatedly but genuinely, to do better.
The Bill Callahan who shows up on this record is not just rethinking how he writes, but how he talks to himself. Somewhere along the way, he realized his inner monologue had been running a quiet smear campaign. “I’ve noticed that I have the worst negative inner voice,” he tells me. “Like just telling me I’m a piece of shit 24/7. Recently, I’ve learned how to, well, not take that to heart all the time.” That process—of refusing to believe his own worst narration—runs parallel to the album’s project of writing a less flattering, more accurate self into the songs. The man trying to be “the man I’m supposed to be” is also the man trying to stop taking that voice as gospel.
When I ask how, exactly, he managed to make that shift—considering most of us still struggle with it daily—he chalks most of it up to just getting “some good therapists.” (And possibly some good antidepressants, too; he sings of walking “among the Zoloft pines / Where tufted Lexapro sings a song so fine” in “Stepping Out For Air.”) As a result, Callahan has come to terms with the fact that he’s spent most of his life rarely looking out for anyone but “numero uno,” as he dryly puts it—and that even when he cared mostly about himself, he still wasn’t caring for himself. “Something I’ve learned recently is that I’ve never been very forgiving or nurturing of myself which—as indulgent as that sounds, or did sound to me in the past—is really important,” he says.
Having kids forced a change in perspective. Parenthood made him a caretaker for others the first time, but it also highlighted the gap between how he treated them and how he treated himself. “It’s important to look after yourself as if you are a child, or just a human that needs,” he says. “I never really looked at myself like that until really recently. Not until the last five months, or something.” That timing means My Days of 58 is still, then, a kind of snapshot of a slightly earlier time—these songs are “toddlers,” not yet fully walking—but it also explains why the record feels simultaneously settled and in flux. You can hear a late‑in‑life kindness trying to catch up with an older, harsher way of being.
Age sharpens that belief without turning the record into a scold. At one point, he jokes that he does have teenage fans, but isn’t sure how many 15‑ or 16‑year‑olds really want “to buy a record about a 58‑year‑old man,” then immediately imagines My Days of 58 as something a younger listener might treat, half‑seriously, as a warning; as evidence that the feeling of not having lived enough doesn’t dissolve with time so much as change its shape. He’s quick to add that it would be “kind of weird” for a 24‑year‑old to carry themselves like a 58‑year‑old (“Who wants to have dinner at 5:30?”), so the point isn’t to import his worries early, but to recognize them when they arrive. The songs split the difference. They’re anchored in late‑fifties specifics—colonoscopies, kids, parents gone, a body that has started to misbehave—but the anxieties they’re working through are the same ones I currently feel nipping at my heels half a life earlier: What if I haven’t spent enough of my time living, much less living well?
From there, the record starts to move outward into cities, highways, deserts, and lakes, but those places still behave like extensions of the same inner world. When I bring up “Highway Born” and how it plays like a love song to the road and to the idea of home at the same time, he traces it back to a long-standing split. “I’ve always found that I need both in my life, ever since I started,” he says. “I need to tour, and then I get tired of that and I need to be home, and then I get tired of that, you know? They so blatantly feed each other. It’s symbiotic, almost.” Restlessness and attachment aren’t opposing forces here; they’re the same current, redirected.
Callahan talks about America in similar terms. You ask him what kind of America this album describes, given how often it roams between “Highway Born,” “West Texas,” and “Lonely City,” and he shrugs off the idea that he’s making a national portrait at all. “I think I’m kind of more focused on myself, as a 58-year-old man, and the landscape as an extension of that,” he says. Even the clichéd idea of the city gets reworked into something more human-scaled. “Lonely City,” he points out, is one of the first times he’s written a kind of love song to a place; something he was wary of at first precisely because of how corny that concept can be.
“It’s kind of a little bit of a cliché, I guess? To write a love song to a city,” he admits. “When I had the idea, a little part of me said ‘No, that’s not your thing, man!’ But then I started to realize how much a city is just a human. It grows and it shrinks, it dies and it comes back to life. It’s a living thing.” The song treats the city like a companion (“Lonely city, I’ll keep you company”) and a lover whose “Skyscraper King Kong could climb you / with a tender palm, define you,” but it’s also about the version of Callahan who keeps returning there, walking around to “see what’s new” after every tour. “That’s why people travel,” he says. “Just like visiting different people all over the world, but with cities.” In a record obsessed with how to be a person among other people, the landscapes are less backdrop than mirror.
Even the most geographically anchored songs—“West Texas,” with its “interlude of certitude and gratitude” on the long straight road; “Lake Winnebago,” with its lake flies and Fond du Lac memories—aren’t really about the map. “I think countries are internal anyway, they’re just images that we use,” he muses. “Cowboys and horses… They’re just cultural images we use to understand ourselves and explain our inner reality.” On My Days of 58, America is less a subject than a set of props: highways, cities, deserts, lakes, all pressed into service to show what’s shifting inside one particular person.
Considering the landscapes on My Days of 58 are internal, it comes as no real surprise that the spirit world doesn’t live very far away either. When I ask what “cultural images” he keeps coming back to, he doesn’t hesitate. “Pretty obviously, horses hold a certain sway over me,” he says, a self-effacing grin sliding onto his face. “I always think they’re, like, messages from the spiritual realm, really. Horses—and birds, too—are so prehistoric.” From there we end up talking about dinosaurs, consciousness, and the feeling that “there’s something missing from our knowledge right now.” He’s juggling “a bunch of different theories,” including the idea that “there is probably a non-human intelligence out there that is maybe using our consciousness to get something done for themselves,” maybe even “powering their planet with our thoughts.” It sounds wild on paper, but in his mouth it’s as calm and provisional as a weather report: here’s one way it might be.
Reincarnation is another of the theories he’s carrying around, but not as an abstract doctrine so much as an explanation for why it feels so urgent to try to be decent. He tells me that, somewhere along the line, he started to believe we “live over and over until you get it ‘right,’ quote-unquote,” and that romantic partnerships are where that refining work actually happens. “Why do I want to please my wife so much, you know?” Callahan asks, half to himself. “I’m trying to be a better person, constantly.” Friendships are important, he says, but “more forgiving,” “more fun”; a partner “really hold[s] a mirror up,” and you can’t evade that reflection forever. That logic is all over My Days of 58: in “And Dream Land,” where two people “died as children” and have since lived “ten lives together and counting” but still feel each other’s touch like “electricity”; in the way “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” keeps insisting “I don’t wanna be the man that I am anymore / I want the man you see to be the man you adore.” The cosmology might be loose, but the stakes are practical. If you’re going to keep coming back, he seems to suggest, you might as well start getting it right. And if you’re not, well. You better start trying to get it “right” now.
Music, in this scheme, is less a job than a technology for getting closer to whatever that cosmology is. One string on a guitar and “the room is filled with this vibration”; reading a novel and having your own reality melt away feels to him like “thought vibrations” doing similar work. “All forms of art are capable of being spiritual things,” he says, but music is the quickest route, considering it’s built upon the literal vibration of a string. Not a shortcut, exactly, more like the most direct path.
The desire to make a “living room record”wasn’t just about mood, then; it was about honoring those vibrations, keeping them honest. Callahan started by tracking basic duo performances with drummer Jim White—voice and guitar against drums, no full band yet—then spent time working guitar-to-guitar with Matt Kinsey and sending evolving demos to saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, who was charged with charting horn parts for certain songs. “My demos tend to change a lot, which I don’t think was easy for him. I think he got a little frustrated sometimes,” he laughs, trailing off as he remembers how many times he sent Laurenzi a new version. Delegating the horn arrangements was partly logistical, partly philosophical: “Something I’ve learned is to free myself up so I can focus on less—so I can give more of myself to less of the record.” He still wanted spontaneity on top of those charts; the horns were asked to sound like “someone on the couch playing,” and he talks about throwing “off the cuff stuff on top of the charted horns in a couple cases where they weren’t fully doing what I wanted.” Structure and chance are meant to coexist, not cancel each other out.
Something similar governs what he wants out of art in general. “For me, art is about, like, changing,” he says. “If I go to an art museum, I want to see a painting that changes my life. If I buy a record, I want it to change my life.” He doesn’t say this grandly; it’s closer to a preference, a rule of thumb. But it’s hard not to hear it as a kind of mission statement for My Days of 58, especially given how much of the album is spent interrogating whether he’s willing to change himself.
But the record technically ends with stasis. “The World Is Still” circles a single image—“The world is still / so still / just like the break of dawn / breaking on my window sill”—and then refuses to elaborate. “And nothing has changed / and nothing ever will,” he sings, over a small, circling arrangement that feels like it could loop forever. After an album full of motion and dedicated to change—touring highways, stepping out for air, reincarnating across deserts and dreamscapes, altering one’s perception of self—that line lands like a contradiction. If nothing ever changes, what’s he been doing for 12 songs? Hell, for 25 albums?
Maybe the answer is that “nothing has changed” and “everything is different” can both be true, depending on where you stand. Callahan insists he feels roughly the same making records now as he did in his Smog days; his “brain is doing the same thing that it [did then],” his body feels the same in the studio. He’s still chasing vibrations in a room, still trying to write songs that double as “spirit things,” still using countries and animals and lovers as tools to think with. But the way he’s willing to see himself inside those songs has shifted. The world, in other words, might be still—but people aren’t. Or, at least, people shouldn’t be.
Callahan is, technically, the elder statesman here: a man with 30 years of records behind him, a deep voice people call “authoritative” whether he likes it or not. But he doesn’t carry himself like someone delivering a finished philosophy. My Days of 58 is a title that could have sounded like a verdict in his hands, but in his son’s, it feels more like a snapshot. There are other days coming. There will be other versions of him, in other rooms, trying to make sense of whatever comes next. For now, this is the one we get: a middle-aged Bill Callahan, suspicious of his own myths, newly protective of his own softness, willing to rewrite the story while he’s still living it.
My Days of 58 is out February 27 on Drag City.
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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