Bill Callahan’s Vita Nuova

On his latest album, the singer-songwriter explores themes of fatherhood, time, and forgiveness.

By Sebastian LangdellFebruary 26, 2026

• Music

A FUNNY THING happened when Bill Callahan moved to Austin, Texas, in 2004. There’s only a two-year span between Supper (2003) and A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005), yet River sounds like a man renewed. The songs—released under his previous band name, Smog—lean into Western tones. He’s newly attentive to nature. There’s a consistent theme of rebirth, return, “phoenixing.” The songs “Say Valley Maker,” “Let Me See the Colts,” and his rendition of the traditional folk song “In the Pines” lay the groundwork for a cowboy persona, as if by landing in Austin he found a new wellspring of energy.

I get it. I moved here too, in 2007. I had been listening to A River Ain’t Too Much to Love while living in darkest England the year prior. My English grandfather died that year, and I helped my grandma with funeral arrangements. She had grown deaf by then. She was still driving somehow, and I’d ride shotgun while gripping the seat. If we were about to collide with another car, I’d grab her arm, and she’d read my lips and then make a correction. I would make her phone calls to old friends to share the sad news about my grandpa. Sometimes we’d just drive around Oxfordshire and slow down in front of her friends’ houses, and she’d scream out the window: “Something terrible has happened! My husband has died!” When the person would respond, she’d point to her hearing aid and say, “Sorry, can’t hear,” and we’d drive on.

 A River Ain’t Too Much to Love soundtracked my gray mornings and grayer afternoons, along with Joanna Newsom’s Ys, released that winter. Callahan and Newsom were dating in those days, and there’s something of a portal between the two albums: she plays piano on his “Rock Bottom Riser,” and he provides a particularly moving vocal counterpoint at the end of “Only Skin” (from Ys). I loved listening to those songs and thinking of what love—and creative fulfillment—could feel like, at their zenith. And what was this river? Why would it be too much to love?

I remember going to Barton Springs upon moving to Austin and seeing Callahan seated up at the top of the grassy hill. Barton Springs is a dream. It’s not a pool so much as a dammed-off section of Barton Creek, a segment of Texas’s own Colorado River, which is known in Austin as “Town Lake.” All this water rushes through the heart of Downtown, separating North from South Austin. It is the most natural, most vibrant part of the city. It’s where the runners, kayakers, SUP boarders, and swimmers meet. Barton Springs has the added value of being fed continuously by a natural spring. Which means it isn’t treated with chemicals: you’re just swimming in cool, clean water. Diving in means being chilled to your core. Back in those days, my girlfriend and I would bake in the sun till we were burning, then dive into the freezing cold water, then lie back in the sun till we were achingly hot again. At some point, I decided that spring was the spiritual core of Austin. I decided the phrase “a river ain’t too much to love” referred to this exact place, this exact feeling. I love it here. I think I’ll stay.

Fast-forward a decade. I marry my girlfriend, and Callahan marries Hanly Banks, who directed Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film in 2012. They move to Santa Barbara, California, briefly so Banks can attend grad school, and Callahan locks up creatively. He stops writing. Then they return to Austin and the songs come pouring and pouring right out of his chest. In 2019, he reflected on this for The New Yorker: “When we came back, all of the songs started pouring out of me. That was the first time I really thought, O.K., this must be home. […] That was the first time I recognized what a home could be.” All those songs became a double album, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019), in which he navigates the vicissitudes of his new life as a married man and a dad. It’s my favorite of his albums, maybe tied with River—one album marking the beginning of his Austin chapter, the other marking the beginning of his life as a family man.

Shepherd is a record about the pins-and-needles feeling of having the songs return to your hands, after the major life shift of getting married and having kids. “It feels good to be writing again,” he sings on “Writing.” At the time of Shepherd’s release, Callahan admitted that he’d wondered for a short time if he’d have to hang up his hat and pivot from his old life as a songwriter to his new life as a dad. Then he realized that he had to keep writing, keep playing; he just had to figure out how to write about his new life in a genuine way. He could tell when he was bullshitting, he said: “I felt like I was writing what I was supposed to write, what a new father, a new husband, was supposed to write about. But I always know when I’m bullshitting myself, and I was. I had to try to keep saying that to myself—bullshit.”

The best song on that album—among his best, period—is “Watch Me Get Married.” It begins:

The stars are blue around me, that much I can see
Like distant members of my distant twinkling blue family

Watching me get married to the immensity
The orchid in the canyon is the one for me

When I hear Callahan talk about needing to write about his new life in a way that doesn’t bullshit or conform to expectations, I think about this. What is the immensity? Maybe real love. The kind that comes around once in a lifetime, and that’s if you’re lucky. Banks is not the immensity; love is. Banks is the orchid in the canyon.

This is honeymoon music, sometimes literally: “I stood on the surf in Kauai / While my love videoed me / On honeymoon,” he croons on “What Comes After Certainty.” There’s a steadiness to his survey of immensities: a steady hand taking note of this moment in time, the depth of love, the wideness of the sea, “God’s face on the water.” (Callahan tends to talk about God when he’s deep in love; the inverse is also true.) He gets to the heart of a certain kind of gratitude that can befall a man on an ordinary day in middle life:

Little old house, recent-model car
And I got the woman of my dreams
And an imitation Eames

Here I am, in the same city as Callahan, in a renovated 1950s bungalow, with a recent-model car, the woman of my dreams, and a set of black imitation Eames chairs we bought on Amazon. It’s nice to feel seen. But then the hard parts seep in.

There’s the truism that a great artist may start seeing a therapist and then their art goes to shit. In Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006), David Lynch writes about seeing a psychiatrist once and asking him head-on whether therapy might negatively affect his creativity. The psychiatrist said it could, and Lynch never returned. Transcendental meditation, for him, was the answer to this problem. Something that could focus his mind without impinging on his artistic vision.

Callahan started seeing a therapist in that six-year interim between Dream River (2013) and Shepherd; in his interview with The Creative Independent, he credits therapy for his return to form, his return to songwriting: “I found a really good therapist, the first one who actually got me. They helped me instead of just grasping at straws, like they often seem to be doing. It was the hugest feeling of change I’ve ever experienced.”

I imagine that the song “Empathy,” my favorite on his new record, My Days of 58, could not have been written without those therapy sessions. It’s the song all good men must write at some point in their adult lives (whether recorded or not, sung or not): the song addressed to “Dad,” which allows for the hurt caused over the years but also refuses to paint the first person as perfect in himself, free from reproach.

Callahan begins by recounting an encounter with his father at age 30: “You said you got by without a father so you figured why should I have one.” He recalls “the day [he] earned [his father’s] respect” by showing him a $3,000 check earned by playing a single show in New York. He owns up to his own shortcomings—“Dad, I’m just like you”—before questioning whether this is true. In the second half of the song, he trains his lens on his relationship with his own son and daughter: “Now I’m pushing 60 / With two kids of my own.” He imagines how they’ll view him when they’re “fully grown.” His love for his daughter and son tumbles out in two perfectly honed verses:

I broke my toe
I couldn’t go
To the father-daughter dance
It broke her heart so
It broke my heart so

And I’m always screeching at my boy
To do this or that
But when I got back from the road
He hugged me so hard
I lost my hat

In the song, Callahan credits his daughter for “making beauty” and his son for “making empathy.” The “empathy” that gives the song its title comes as a gift from son to father. And Callahan is able to offer it to his own father in return: “Dad, I know your heart was broken long ago / And the two things that I’ve come to know / The two pieces of your heart / Rendered so.”

Pushing 60, the songwriter has come to realize that his own father’s heart had been broken by his father. And when passing the hurt down, Callahan’s father was showing him the two pieces of his own broken heart. The task for Callahan: to keep his own heart whole in order to keep from passing down the hurt. Whether or not he’s “just like his dad,” only time will tell, but a willingness to even frame that question, admit to his own shortcomings, and not excuse himself from fault shows a brand of bravery that, we sense, his own father never gained.

It’s something I find myself thinking about a lot these days in my interactions with my own son and daughter. How might I deal with the pain passed down to me in such a way that I’m able to be both present and supportive for my kids? Therapy helps with that. As do exercise, meditation, and sunlight. Creative expression. Things that would have sounded like luxuries to our fathers’ generations reveal themselves to be necessities if your task is to break a pattern and impart love and support to the next generation.

Three decades have passed since Callahan’s heartbreaking moment with his father. (That notion of pushing 60 seems to be very much on his mind, hence the album title My Days of 58, which, according to the liner notes, was dreamed up by his son Bass, another gift from son to father.) Callahan highlights that 30-year stretch at the top of “Pathol O.G.” A spoken-word lead-in tells us, “You know I’ve been writing songs and singing them for nigh on 30 years / I like it / I love it!” In the beginning, writing songs was for Callahan a way of reaching out to others, reaching out to himself, reaching out to “the spirits.” As time wore on, he found himself “increasingly turning to [his] guitar instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion.” (I love how he sings echoing backup to himself on each of these italicized words, as if undercutting his own earnestness—like how he gives a coy little laugh at the end of “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” after repeating “We take life seriously / Laugh in the face of death.” Or the way he whelps “Help, help!” off the cuff, early in “Stepping Out for Air.”)

What had started out as a means to communion with others ended up as a way for Callahan to shield himself from the world. The guitar can be a megaphone calling outward or a carapace behind which you hide. “I started to wonder, is this creativity or pathology?” he sings. Having “one foot on the ladder to heaven” means sitting in your room writing songs, calling up the ladder to the spirits while your friends are goading you outside: “Friend would call, say, Let’s get together at seven, / I’d say, sorry Pal, I got one foot on the ladder to heaven!” My favorite couplet on a record flush with them.

“Stepping Out for Air” is a paean to, well, getting some fresh air for the sake of mental health. It feels like an answer, some 20 years down the road, to “The Well” from A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. That earlier song unfolds like a story: “I could not work,” Callahan tells us, “so I threw a bottle into the woods.” After the bottle breaks, he starts to feel bad for the animals who might step on it and cut their paws, so he delves into the woods looking for the pieces.

The 2026 version is consonant yet medicated, and the stakes are raised: “I’m going to take a walk among the Zoloft pines / Where Tufted Lexapro sings a song so fine […] I’m stepping out for air so I don’t drown.” (Here he’s glancing toward that Texan songbird, the tufted titmouse.) He’s stepping out for air. “The answer is not sitting in this chair / Snowshoe hare, it’s time to leave your lair.” The music changes here, just after the three-minute mark: the horns take a break, the bass takes on new purpose. And leaving his lair pays dividends: the song crescendoes in something like a prayer: “Oh wind! Lift us up! / And Gabriel come blow your horn!” Sure enough, the trombone responds, twining with Matt Kinsey’s chiming guitar and Jim White’s pattering drums for one of the most perfect finishes on the album. Sure, it stretches past seven minutes, but not a moment is wasted.

There’s thanks to be given for the refuge of making music on your own, for your own sanity, in your own room. But the greater calling is toward what happens when the music steps outside, when it hits the road and reaches others. To Callahan’s mind, in his new life as a family man, there’s a parallel to be drawn to the stages of love and commitment: “When you are dating, you only see each other / And the rest of us can go to hell,” he muses on “Pigeons” on 2020’s Gold Record, “but when you are married, you are married to the whole wide world.” It sounds a lot like getting married to “the immensity.” But where that earlier reference gestured to a vast love, here vows beget responsibility. You leave the solipsistic bubble of your dating life and reach out to the world as you start a family, as you negotiate together your place in that world, what you’ll stand for, who you’ll raise, and how.

But also, don’t overthink it. “I can tell you about the river,” Callahan sang in his earliest Austin days. The river spread out before him like so much love he’d one day be forced to leave behind. “I can tell you about the river, or we could just get in.”