The Doctor Came At Dawn

The Doctor Came At Dawn LP (1996) was an extremely cold sounding record compared to Bill's previous major release Wild Love. The cover art is a big old ship, which reminds me of the Velvet Underground’s Heroin song that talks about “clipper ships”. It was rumoured that Bill was doing heroin in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he sings about taking methadone instead in 2006. Bill's favourite author at this time was Martin Amis and Bill spoke in interviews about liking tempeh sandwiches. 

You Moved In is set in a hotel and has a spying theme of Bill Callahan tapping someone’s phones and reading their mail. He says “And I hope you don’t mind, if I grab your private life, slap it on the table, and split it with a knife”. Bill's long running spy theme must be heavily influenced by his parents' intelligence careers. But I think there's also a parallel with being a songwriter, after all in these records he is not just singing about himself alone, he's singing about Cindy and her having an affair. It's her private life that's here for us to look at. 

Somewhere In The Night is another jealous song with the girlfriend cheating on the narrator by feeding another man with a spoon, and the narrator tells her to be with that man instead. Lize is about the girlfriend lying to him but not as well as she used to. 

Everything You Touch Becomes A Crutch is about him feeling like he is too open with Cindy Dall, and he should stay more like a loner, so he tells her to go out with other men. It is about how he tries to be restrained with what he communicates “Never said too much, I tried to save face…only a few spare incidents of disgrace. He talks about beating himself up over it, and that he wished he could have left his issues outside of the relationship “maybe I should have left all this in an airport lockup box in Boston”.

All Your Women Things is about a woman’s clothes, it has an Orientalist theme, and is about the narrator making a sex doll out of his ex-girlfriends clothes (which I presume is a joke), and berating himself for not being able to love the woman well enough to stop her cheating on him, then says the woman was from 7 years ago, although I think its about Cindy really, with a thin veneer of fiction layered over the top. 

Whistling Teaport (Rag) is about how angry Bill is, like a teapot whistles when it is very hot and boiling. He is angry at Cindy and about the affair and says “between the two of you [you] could not come up with enough compassion not to screw”.  Four Hearts In A Can continues the story of the affair and is about 4 people in a car because its Bill and Cindy and Will and Dianne. 

The final track Hangman’s Blues is about life being a joke and a waiting game. We see from this that Bill was very affected by the turn of events, possibly he should have got some counselling rather than made so many songs up about it. We see that he does the exact same thing over again when Will had an affair with Joanna Newsom when she was dating Bill in 2004-2007. Bill tends to get over-affected and loses his rationality over these things and makes a large number of songs about them when maybe 2 songs would suffice.