Bill Callahan: "Jim Cain"

The hyperbolic immaturity of Top 40 often fools people into thinking that a single, jack-hammered emotion is the only way for a song to truly “express” something profound—a silly idea, but one that often gets more oblique music unfairly tagged as hermetic, or too detached to mean anything to anyone. And of course, that’s bullshit. On “Jim Cain,” Bill Callahan agrees fully, crafting another slow acoustic pattern laced with eighth-note drums to whip us out of the busyness that marred 2007’s Woke On A Whaleheart, forcing the listener to slow down and start taking deep breaths. After a proper acclimatization period, Callahan’s inherently funny, Berman-esque baritone gets mixed close to the ear, almost disconcertingly personal in its clarity. The sardonic tone adds a wobbly layer of twinkling detachment to the lyrics, plainly heartbroken but still brimming with wonderment at the “ordinary things” that ecstatic happiness ignores.

Perhaps the line that best sums up the song is the whammy that goes “I used to be darker / Then I got lighter / Then I got dark again.” In his oblique way, Callahan has made happiness deeper through sadness, and vice versa. Suddenly, any less harmonic view of the universe seems like existential perjury. As the song builds, strings and pump organ evoke a mystical, pastoral ‘70s where Nilsson roamed free while indulging in Transcendental Meditation instead of liquor, a familiar, lived-in atmosphere that the often lo-fi or garage-y Callahan sounds like he was born into. And yet, the song is better defined by its stubborn homelessness, the convincing idea that meaning is contained not in a time or thing but in all time and things working together in harmony.