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.