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If 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart signaled a coming out for Bill Callahan, as much from the caustic, gloomy temperament of his previous work as from the Smog moniker, then Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle presents the still-local songwriter searching for his way in the newly broken sunlight. In fact, much of the album plays as if waking questioningly from a dream, still caught in the lost space between sleep and consciousness and trying to gather one’s senses and realize what the day has to bring. Yet there is a much deeper and personal drama unfolding in these songs, one that moves constantly from a vulnerability and fear to beautiful reflection and hope. Callahan has always had the ability to distill some of the most brutal realizations into striking phrases that pierce with his dry, repetitive delivery, so what makes Eagle so stunning is the range of his outlook, and the seeming exposure of the songwriter in ways that were before buried behind his dark humor or Smog-draped distortion.
“I started out in search of ordinary things,” Callahan intones on opener “Jim Cain,” the gently picked acoustic guitar moving into a delicate string arrangement that characterizes the album. The song is intensely reflective and shaded by a loneliness, an acknowledgement of past paths that isn’t sunk necessarily in regret, but certainly not at peace either. While mirroring the introspection of A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, the elaborate arrangements carry an added weight. At times on the album, the strings swoon a bit too saccharine, an odd contrast to Callahan’s dry baritone that doesn’t always work. Still, unlike the calamitous arrangements on Whaleheart that signaled his post-Smog direction, Eagle is tightly wound with every piece carefully intertwined. “Jim Cain” appropriately signals what is to follow in the contemplative spirit and fuller sound, and is perhaps the most personal and best song on the album.
The throbbing bass and piano propelled stomp of “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” veers into the darker territory of Callahan’s reflections. “Show me the way to shake a memory,” he pleads, and the song is gripped in the desire to break free and let go in a way that seems impossible. As Callahan sings on the following “The Wind and the Dove,” “I am a child of linger-on,” highlighting the struggle between simultaneously looking forward and back. The beautifully tender “Rococo Zephyr” offers the other side of memory, the recall of past love that doesn’t dwell on its loss, but revels in its moment and uncertainty of its simple possibility. Set up against the later “My Friend,” where Callahan growls out the title in ominous tenacity to the declaration “I will always love you,” the tension of holding on comes full to the fore.
Sandwiched between the lovelorn dichotomy of “Rococo Zephyr” and “My Friend” is the album’s second best offering in “Too Many Birds.” Following Callahan’s cryptic natural imagery, the song gently unfolds the metaphor of a blackbird separating from the flock, looking for its own place both within and outside the gathering. But the song’s turn inward at the end to the drawn out line of “If you could only stop your heartbeat for one heartbeat” signals the deeper connection lost. That song’s balancer emerges with “All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast,” the brooding and vicious attack on the solitary Eagle reigning but vulnerable in the skies. Callahan’s voice quivers with the fight as he howls the title atop the pummeling percussion and droning strike of guitar to beg “sweet desire and soft thoughts return to me.”
The entire album plays as a back and forth of memory, the desire to hold on and the necessity of letting go, or vice versa. Yet “Faith/Void,” while bringing that dichotomy to the surface, also seems to end Eagle on a peaceful or hopeful note. Callahan declares repeatedly to start the tune “It’s time to put God away,” and while it’s not clear what his conception of God is in terms of the album, it rings out like the packing up of the suitcase, a moving on from the things that held him back. Yet contradictorily, the peace that seems to permeate the realization comes from his stopping the search for it: “This is the end of faith, no more must I strive to find my peace in the light.” If that means that upon the introspection that the songs present, Callahan has decided to re-embrace the void and darker side of his nature, it brings the album, and his musical career, full circle; for as he acknowledges on “Jim Cain”: “I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again, and something too big to be seen was passing over and over me.”
