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.