The Milk Eyed Mender

Joanna Newsom released The Milk Eyed Mender LP in 2004 on Drag City. The LP had a cutesy girly cover with scribbly embroidery and a photo of Joanna Newsom. It was very twee and naive looking. Joanna has said in interviews that her records are biographical although they use metaphor. 

Track 1 Bridges And Balloons starts with an exploring the sea theme in a 15th C boat, with Joanna noting that their fates were not yet decided “fates as malleable as clay” and that they could come to no good end “ships are fallible”. The ship then shapeshifts into a wicker beetle shell. This shape shifting device is common to Joanna's work as a songwriter, one thing commonly transforms into another. She also tends to use words because they sound good, rather than they lend meaning to the song. So in this case the wicker beetle shell sounds cute and is cute imagery but has little meaning. It is probable that the lyrics about sailing away on a boat referred to Joanna's leaving university and trying to embark on a music career, knowing that she could fail and she didn’t have a back up. 

Track 2 Sprout And The Bean has a similar theme of things starting out and growing and how things end up. Like she said fates are maleable in the first song, this time she says that the “difference between the sprout and the bean it is a golden ring it is a twisted string.” Other than that it is a song about sleeping all day and considering going outside, because she had a lot of spare time. 

Track 3 The Book of Right On is a song about how Joanna will fight and select her circle carefully. It desribes her as killing her dinner with karate and that her “fighting fame is fabled”. She asks another person if they want to sit at her table and run with her pack, as if she is selective about her hangers on and runs with wolves. At this point she was linked to Will Oldham who in this period commonly referred to himself as a Wolf (see Master And Everyone, and Superwolf). She tells the person “stick with your kind” and says that they “know [their] place” as if she thinks they are not good enough for her social pack. It is not explained what the book of right on is, but I think Joanna means 60s and 70s kind of people who say “right on!”. 

Track 4 Sadie is about a white dog who buries bones and pinecones. This has religious themes with the narrator praying and suspending the notion of death and talking about mercy, as if she had done things that were wrong, and asking the Lord to lead her to water. All the things she built, breathed, split, or pulled up like weeds are burning. As if her life is changing.  And then she stitches an adage "Bless our house and its heart so savage” which draws attention to the more brutal side of Joanna Newsom even though her work is seen as girly and twee. She sings that  everything she wants, needs, and got is scattering like seed, and all that she knew is moving away. Which is a similar theme to the first song about the ship setting out. 

Track 5 Inflamatory Writ is about a guy who does not deserve Joanna or have sufficient devotion to her music. She says “Our music deserving devotion unswerving” as if he needs to have more respect for her music.  Then she talks about her ambition and how she left the guy “Ambition came and reared its head, and went far from you”. She says he has an empty bed and talks about ululating “the lost Great American Novels” which is definitely very ambitious. It is funny to see that Drag City has gone from lo fi musicians who appeared to lack ambition even to tune their guitars properly, to a decade a later their musicians hoping to create the equivalent of the Great American Novels.  

Track 6 This Side Of The Blue seems to be about being alive and not dead. Like that side of the blue is death, and this side of the blue is life. Joanna is not progressing well, she has a kind friend called Jaime. Then she talks about writing and linguistics “the signifieds bump heads with the signifiers and we all fall down slack jawed to marvel at words.” The signifieds are the things, and the signifiers are the words that signify the things, so if they bump heads it means the thing does not like the words about them. Only a person would care that words you write about them are not right. Inaniminate objects and plants and animals do not care what words you write about them. 

Track 7 En Gallop is about Joanna going on an adventure and leaving college. She thinks it was damp and ghostly with “halls... lined with the disembodied and dusty wings” as if college wasn't lively enough for her. The song then talks about how important making money is for her and she’s having some regrets — “you laws of property Oh you free economy and you unending afterthoughts you could have told me before”. She then warns herself not to forget the truth which is similar to the lines about signifieds in the previous song, where the person does not like what she wrote about them. 

Track 8 Cassiopeia is named after a constellation named after a vain queen. It is about being in bed. 

Track 9 Peach Plum Pear is about her seeing a hot guy in a shop. She calls other women “floozies”. She says “this was unlike the story it was written to be, I was riding its back when it used to ride me” which means she has gotten better at flirting with men and has control of the situation. Then it ends with a reference to the chidlrens’s story book Peach Plum Pear which has no meaning other than sounding cutesy unless Joanna was shopping for a kids book. 

Track 10 Swansea has her wanting to gnaw on white bones like she’s a dog  — similar to the Sadie song about a dog burying a bone — and watch freight trains paw at the night as if freight trains are a novelty to her. I am not sure how a train can paw at anything. It goes on about ghost towns which reminds me of the lines about the disembodied in En Gallop. Places that are not lively. 

Track 11 Three Little Babes is a traditional song about dead children. Joanna has talked about mimicking the voice of Texas Gladden — who is known for singing this song — early in her career. 

Track 12 Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie has her saying “it feels so good to be a rose” and talks about how she loves how people adore her “It's why I love this town, Well just look around, To see me serenaded hourly and celebrated sourly and dedicated dourly Waltzing with the open sea, clam crab cockle cowrie, Will you just look at me?” 

Joanna Newsom and the Creative Class

In the early 2000s 90s lo-fi indie musicians became popular with the younger hipsters. Recorded music sales went down hill after 2000. Indie bands were selling their songs for advertisements and doing a lot of media interviews and being kind of lifestyle influencers before Instagram. It was like a gold rush as they tried to capitalise on this moment of popularity that had eluded many of them in the 1990s. Audiences downloaded lots of music for free on the internet with file sharing and it was a time when everyone wanted a big digital library of records. This type of indie music was renamed as Post-Punk or Post-Rock and many bands were making pastiche records that referred to the sounds of past records.

Successful indie musicians were also part of the socioeconomic Creative Class (see Richard Florida) which was intrinsic to making some cities internationally hip and increasing economic production. The Creative Class was also linked to processes of gentrification in former working class urban areas and increasing real estate prices. 

Joanna Newsom (b. 1982) was about the age of the young hipsters that liked 90s indie bands in the 2000s. She had dropped out of college to try to pursue a music career. Bill Callahan was one of the 90s indie bands, and there was about 14 years difference between them. 

Joanna Newsom grew up in Nevada City in California, her father was a surgeon. Joanna Newsom was not allowed to watch TV or listen to the radio as a child meaning that she lived a relatively sheltered life while young. She dropped out of Mills College (part of Northeastern) to pursue a music career with her harp playing. Mills College is not a very highly ranked college. Bill had done a few semesters at the University of Maryland and dropped out, that is also not a very highly ranked college. 

The people I knew who studied music at University level said it was very hard to make a profession of it in terms of non-pop or non-rock’n’roll music. It was incredibly competitive to get a career in classical music for example. It was more realistic to become a music teacher or play in indie bands, if you were not totally amazing. By dropping out of college Joanna Newsom cut off the option of being a university teacher or researcher, leaving her only to pursue fame as a singer and harpist in the popular music genre. 

Will Oldham discovered Joanna Newsom around 2002-2003 when he was dating Sue Schofield.  Will Oldham had dated Dianne Belino in an open relationship for around 10 years up until about 2001. Joanna Newsom was then signed to Drag City because of Will Oldham.

Joanna Newsom’s second cousin twice removed is Gavin Newsom who is the current Governor of California and is considered to be a potential Democrat Presidential candidate in the 2024 USA federal election. 

Rock Bottom Riser EP

Bill Callahan did not release an LP in 2006, but he released an EP Rock Bottom Riser with four songs on it, Sometimes I Feel Like The Mother Of The World about two people fighting, also from A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, and two new songs Bowery and Fools Lament.

The start of Fools Lament is about having been “good for effect” like someone pretending to be a good person but who wasn’t really. He sings that he now sees things clearly but he links this to his vision failing. He’s been using drugs or drinking to “take the edge off”. He refers to a Joanna Newsom song that goes chimcherree “chipchee” and talks about a sculptor making a bust of a woman and not knowing when to stop chipping. Then it seems to refer to Joanna Newsom's Monkey And Bear song from her 2006 LP Ys “My comeuppance I embrace Like a monkey dressed just like me”. Monkey and Bear is a song about two circus animals who live on a farm, the Bear wants to escape but the Monkey wants the Bear to keep performing to earn more money. It has the Freak Show kind of theme that is familiar to Joanna Newsom's 2006 work, when she was one of the most prominent artists in the American Freak Folk genre. Freak Folk was a kind of deliberately weird clickbait seeking revival of the 1960s Folk Revival, with virtually no political content. 

Bowery is a song about three generations of men, a grandfather, a father, and the narrator the child. Bowery is in Manhattan. Bowery Ballroom was a popular indie band venue at the time when Hipsters were cool. It was referred to in the song Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror by Jeffrey Lewis in 2005 “I was pretty sure I saw Will Oldham He was wearin' the same sunglasses he had on stage at the Bowery Ballroom.” In this song Bill Callahan says his grandfather died and his father tried to find his bones. It refers to the song I’m New Here on A River Ain’t Too Much To Love “I’m new here. Where can a fella eat” and the father dies after taking his last breath “when he came up from the river of methadone”. Methadone was invented in 1937 in German. This is the only time I have ever heard of Bill explaining what the river is. 

A River Ain't Too Much To Love

Bill Callahan released A River Ain’t Too Much To Love 31 May 2005. It was recorded November 2004. The cover had a hole burned out of paper — similar to what children do as an art activity — like there was something he wanted to hide or make disappear. I see this record as one of Bill's most important works, and even as marking a turning point in his musical style and a demonstration of heightened new ambition for a man who started out making scrappy four track records. 

The river symbol is linked to Cindy Dall in Red Apple Falls, although in 2006 he links it to methadone, so I think it means his relationship with Cindy Dall and also the affair she had and the heroin (later methadone) which he started around then. So he’s essentially saying with this title that drugs and Cindy Dall memories aren’t much to love. 

Bill Callahan seems to have started dating Joanna Newsom around 2004, as she toured with him overseas and played with him at the Drag City Christmas Party that year. Joanna Newsom's Wikipedia page says it was a short relationship in 2005, but other online references say they dated from 2004-2007. In October 2005 Bill Callahan was sleeping with at least one other woman in the music industry according to industry scuttlebutt, as Joanna Newsom had had an affair with Will Oldham in 2005. Bill Callahan, unlucky in love as usual, was left to tour this record about Joanna Newsom, while their relationship was troubled from the affair. Probably a bad idea to date a young musician who owed Will Oldham her career for discovering her and getting her signed to Drag City. There was a big age gap between Bill and Joanna Newsom, he was born in 1966, and she was born in 1982. 

Track 1 Palimpsest is named after a text that is written over and written over again. For a songwriter and performer this probably means his old texts were given new meaning. The song starts with a claim that his soul is not winter but the biding for spring. As if his life has been bad but he thinks it does not define him, wanting something better during the bad times defines him. This starts out the record’s theme about how his life is going to get better. But then it goes on to his social problems and his weird personality again, themes we have seen in other Smog records many times now, “Why’s everybody looking at me/Like there’s something fundamentally wrong. Like I’m a southern bird that stayed north too long”. 

Track 2 Say Valley Maker continues the theme of how he is going to improve his life. It starts with him in the sea where he lets go in a riptide which means he might drown (“with the grace of a corpse in a riptide I let go”) then he’s in a river not the sea, sliding down river with an empty case. Having an empty case is his crime. This is like his ongoing theme of feeling like a criminal. The empty case possibly means not having much money. He sings in order not to curse, so he’s feeling bad and wanting to curse. Its in the river — “river oh river end” — then the river takes him to a valley of love “take me through the sweet valley where your heart blooms”. Then the river will dry one day and that seems to be about  him dying maybe and he then wants to be buried in wood or stone. Then it says something similar to his early Smog line about “I’m not lonely anymore now that I realise I have two hands not four” except it says that “to make it on [his] own” means “death.” It is kind of like a drugged dream that makes little sense. A stone coffin would be really expensive and heavy. Then it goes on about there being no love. He says he cantered out here — to aloneness and death — but he’s galloping back, like he made a mistake in the direction of his life he took after the Cindy Dall affair and now he wants love again and not drugs and aloneness. Then he goes on about bury him in various ways culminting in “Bury me in fire/And I’m going to phoenix” like he wants to revive his life and career like a phoenix. The last line also reminds me of By The Time I Get To Phoenix by Jimmy Webb. So this song is sort of about how he is desperate to change his life from the drugs and sex that had followed after his break up with Cindy Dall around 8 years ago. 

Track 3 The Well is a boring song about him struggling to write songs. He throws a bottle into the woods, goes to find it, finds a boarded up well because he is so good at throwing things the bottle went like miles into the woods where he never had been before and there was a well. He gets the boards off the well and yells into the well. Will Oldham did make a movie where his charater’s daughter fell down a well. 

Track 4 Rock Bottom Riser starts out with Bill Callahan covering up all the bad stuff about his family “I love my mother, I love my father, I love my sister too”. Then its about him buying a new guitar to pledge his love to a woman, as she has helped him rise up “I am a rock botttom riser and I owe it all to you”. He is then at the river and sees a gold ring and goes diving for it. He gets to the bottom of the river where there is fractured sunlight, then he rises up in the river. His family pull him out of the river. Maybe they paid for drug rehab or something. Singing about pledging his love to someone as if he was an old fashioned gentleman is weird as Bill has never been in his entire life an old fashioned gentleman with dating Lisa Carver, Cindy Dall, and Chan Marshall or the lady he pushed to the floor or the woman he lost his virginity to who looked like a leper. Old fashioned gentleman just is not his usual style. As the river is linked to Cindy Dall and this record is about how he wants to rise up from a bad patch it is like he has made Joanna Newsom his replacement for Cindy Dall. In the indie music scene at this point, everyone started to curate their lives because of the internet and 90s small indie bands getting popular with the younger hipsters. So I see this record more about Bill curating his life for the public, rather than his life miraculously being great. He depicts himself anew with a fashionable image as a reconstructed man, linked romantically to Joanna Newsom a young rising star. 

Track 5 I Feel Like The Mother Of The World refers to the song “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” and talks about his family again. About his mother and sister. It starts with him saying God is a word, whether God exists or not, God is a word. Bill Callahan has talked about his parents raising him as an atheist. Then the chorus goes “Oh do I feel like the mother of the world with two children fighting”. Then he talks about fighting with his sister as kids and their mother would say stop fighting. This was the single and had a film clip with Chloe Sevigny in. It is a weird choice of song for a single film clip. Why would anyone want a single about kids fighting. Due to Bill's hesitance about sharing biographical information its hard to say he fought with anyone other than Will Oldham over the years, or his various high profile musician girlfriends. 

Track 6 In The Pines refers to the old murder ballad song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” that Nirvana played. There is a long train that takes 3 hours to go by. The narrator asks the Captain for the time and the Captain said he threw his watch away. The narrator seems to murder him with a steel rail and goes home. Then the song moves to ask a “little girl” what has he done for her to treat him like this, and she says he made her weep, moan, and leave her home. 

Track 7 Drinking At The Dam is another song of memories, with Bill Callahan recalling drinking at the dam with “jarheads” on the other side. Jarheads are American Marine Corps. He says they drank warm beer and yelled abuse and cut school. Then its about reading porn mags in brambles which is weird because most boys don’t read them in brambles like Brer Rabbit. You would get a lot of scratches doing that. He talks about how he is “holding back what I can but the power is so much” as if he was angry about something. This is after he talked about “teenage warchests fill and do the dirty dirty work”, which sounds like it's about war and young soldiers. 

Track 8 Running The Loping is another song about memories and with a porn theme. This time he is laughing at the pornography of his past. He lights matches and drops them futiley into a wet glass. He then talks about it being Summer and he has a bizarre skin condition where when there is no Sun his skin goes brown, opposite to everyone else whose skin goes brown with the sun. He then makes a note “you wouldn’t know me from your Pa” possibly about his age difference with Joanna Newsom. This song challenges the theme of redemption that started this record, with Bill Callahan saying “I haven’t changed”. He has scratched knees from running the bramble lee and would rather be running the loping. I have no idea what either of these things mean. Then he wants to live in the country like the song Let's Move To The Country on Knock Knock. He talks about getting married “To take a wife and no paper/Never again to wonder/Did that rapper rape her.” You can see how this is his cheating/jealousy fixation again, he is focusing on the idea that if he gets married nobody else will have sex with the woman. This links to the lines in Rock Bottom Riser about pledging his love to a woman. 

Track 9 I’m New Here again talks about how he has not changed after all “I did not become someone different”. The idea is that he is the same person, but in a different place now, in his relationship with Joanna Newsom a rising young star “But I’m new here, will you show me around?” He is still thinking of turning his life around though “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone/You can always turn around" as if he thinks his life is going to get better from this point on. He talks about meeting a woman in bar and saying he was “hard to get to know and impossible to forget” and she says he has a huge ego. He says he is like a snake changing its skin. Snakes are still snakes when they change their skin so this is a confusing sentence. He then says “it may be crazy but I’m the closest thing I have to a voice of reason”. No offence to Bill, but I'm not sure he is a voice of reason judging by his lyrics over the years. I often think he could have done with a good psychologist. 

Track 10 Let Me See The Colts. Colts are young horses. In this song the narrator gets up early and gets someone out of bed to go and see some colts that will be race horses next year. He is a gambling man thinking of the future. There’s more brambles in this song. The third song with brambles on this record. He says that Joanna Newsom thinks he is an “all seeing all knowing eye”. Then they look at some sleeping horses. My cousin has race horses and you don’t go and look at sleeping horses in a field to decide who will win the races next year. 

On this record Bill Callahan refers to Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and possibly By The Time I Get To Phoenix, like he is thinking he will change and be a classic American songwriter. 

Supper

Bill Callahan released the LP Supper in 2003.  The song Feather By Feather has lyrics about an enemy — one of Bill's top themes — “if you’re losing your wings feather by feather/Love the way they whip away/On the wind” “When they make the movie of your life/They’re going to have to ask you/To do your own stunts/Because nobody nobody nobody/Could pull off the same shit as you/And still come out alright.” “It’s Ali versus Clay/Both pummelling away/A champ always fights themself.” Butterflies Drowned in Wine is about a character going into town where he has  usual social issues, another one of Bill's big themes across his work — “I’m going to talk to some people there, forget everything I’m told, in one ear out the other”. Morality is like Dress Sexy At My Funeral where he imagines being married, and in this one he thinks he would have affairs. It is sort of notable that in his early career he was jealous of men having affairs with his girlfriends all the time, and then at this point when he has become more successful in the 2000s he depicts himself as the one cheating. Which is a bit similar to the song on Red Apple Falls where he imagines the widow is cheating on her ghost husband with him. Vessel In Vain is another song about being useless. Truth Serum is a song where he pretends to love a woman and then says love is in an empty box, and she says if the box is empty nothing is in it, which means he doesn’t love her really. This song also shows how he sees the truth is not something clear — "truth is something in between”. The song Our Anniversary continues this theme of a not loving relationship, where the woman forces him to spend their anniversary together by hiding his keys. He likens the two of them and their relationship to the thriving weeds he curses in the garden.

Rain On Lens

Rain On Lens by Smog came out in 2001, it has a spy theme on the cover art with Bill Callahan dressed like a spy in a film noir smoking a cigarette. 

A lot of interesting things were happening in the Intelligence world in 2000-2001. At the end of 2000 the NSA published the Transition 2001 document in preparation for the inauguration of George W Bush. This document stated “senior leadership must understand that today’s and tomorrow’s mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.” They said this transititon was “likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” The NSA wanted to increase domestic surveillance as well as international surveillance and to do this it said it would “live on the network.” And of course on 11 September 2011 we had the disaster of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers which transformed the American defence and intelligence worlds for the next two decades. 

The first track Rain On Lens 1 is about things being bad and rain being on the lens and the boom being in the frame. Like the behind the scenes reality is getting too much into the arty picture. On track 2 Song is a song about doing jobs and doing them very badly and wrong, Bill talks about not being a soldier but being like a solider “I wear no uniform and choose not to fight but fight all night”. It is a weird song. He’s also a gravedigger who doesn’t dig holes but leaves bodies to rot; a pack mule with no pack; a fence painter who looks at women’s backsides; and a peep hole that falls in love with the eyes that look through it. The peep hole is in the surveillance theme. Track 3 Natural Decline is about him having intrusive thoughts and feeling like a criminal again “I see the night sky as a jewelry store window And my mind is half a brick”. Although it would be rather difficult to steal the stars from the sky, and leave things rather black and dark. Track 4 Keep Some Steady Friends Around is a song about being a loner and building a house with a fence all around, but the fence will have a gate for some steady friends. On Track 6 Lazy Rain he goes back to his old theme of not liking his girlfriends watching him at home, and calls her a spy “she’s watching me with one eye, the sleepy little spy.” Track 7 Short Drive continues his theme of enemies “I took your party invitation list and wrote enemies across the top of it”. They go on a long drive, he wants her to scowl with him, and says “you will see some more of our enemies”. I am not sure who his other enemies are apart from Will Oldham. Maybe Bill has a lot of enemies if there needs to be a list, or else it's an exaggeration. Track 8 continues the spying/surveillance theme with the title Live As If Someone Is Always Watching You. It seems to be about his theme of discomfort in a living area with someone watching him, which has been a long term theme in his work and in this song there is a kind of dissociation with his body and life “I am not of this glutty room or of this flubby body”. The final song is about retaliation and is called Revanchism, which means trying to reverse territorial losses. Normally this would be like a global politics word I think, not what people would use about their personal lives. It is a weird song about his sister, she liked dancing, he liked singing, “Sister sister I know you hate to hear me sing I know it makes your skin crawl To see my father mouth do anything at all” then he imagines he has a kid and his son doesn't like singing, and his sister's daughter doesn't like dancing. 

Dongs Of Sevotion

Bill Callahan released Dongs Of Sevotion in 2000. The title again is jokey like the previous Knock Knock. I do not think Bill Callahan had a serious girlfriend at this point. Track 1 Justice Aversion is about revenge “lion bites zebra neck, zebra stomps lion head”. Again he identifies with criminals “I root for the underdog, like the bankrobber in the getaway car”. Track 2 Dress Sexy At My Funeral is a sexist song telling his “wife“ — he was not then married — she doesn’t ever dress sexy but to dress sexy for his funeral and tell the funeral crowd about times they had sex outdoors etc. Track 4 The Hard Road is about being a vagabond and a minor criminal who steals pies and clothes from a line. Track 5 Easily Led has a line about how he is “just trying to be a human”. Track 6 Bloodflow is about him having enemies and wanting to use a machete on them, so kind of like the usual Bill Callahan revenge theme: “Can I borrow your machete? Blood will spill and blood will spurt, enemies keep the mind alert”. Track 7 Nineteen seems to be about Bill Callahan or a character losing his virginity in an embarassing way to a woman who looked like a "leper" without her clothes on which is not very politically correct to put in a song. ”My movements were slow long she didn’t even know what she was taking away”. Track 8 Distance is another song about how he doesn’t feel part of the community and he makes excuses not to go out. He also sings about how he has treated women badly and damaged them “All these women have passed through me I have turned them all to waste”. Track 9 is a song on his common topic of how he doesn’t like other people surveilling him “there are some terrible gossips in this town, with jaws like vices, and eyes like drains”. Track 10 Cold Discovery is about his usual problems with women, similar to I Break Horses where he doesn’t tend to his girlfriends, in this one he has no softness for women “I can hold a woman down on a hardwood floor, and your teeth can gnash right through me looking for a soft place... I had no soft place for you to rest and this was your your cold discovery” and he also sings that the fact he could hold a woman down on a hardwood floor was a cold discovery for him, as I guess it means he was being more violent to women than when he was younger. So he is following in his father’s footsteps after all, in terms of violence to women. This song Cold Discovery is like saying to the more cheerful and upbeat song Cold Blooded Old Times from Knock Knock, that he is back to being cold again, it isn’t something that is just in the past. Track 11 Permanent Smile seems to be about skulls, how a fleshless skull has a permanent smile.