Bill Callahan Tickets

Bill Callahan
Bill Callahan, more commonly known as Smog was born in 1966 in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is both, singer and a songwriter. His music career started off with release of his home made creations prepared on poor quality instruments and equipment. And few years later a record label based in Chicago called Drag City, signed him.

Callahan Debuted with his self released album called Sewn to the sky, released in 1990. It was home made album recorded on poor instruments containing a bit inharmonious music. In the beginning Callahan was known for his highly experimental music that he made on poor quality instruments and a badly tuned guitar possibly a sign of his influence taken from Jandek, who is highly admired by Callahan. But the main reason for that was that he lacked availability resources during the releases of his home made music and that's why his music sounded a bit amateur in the beginning. But as soon as he signed up with Drag City, his music started to sound more professional and the quality and number of instruments used in his songs improved as well.

After the release of his album called Dongs of Sevotion in 2000, his music started to move back to a bit simpler yet professional sounding instruments while keeping the consistency in his songwriting. Callahan's music compositions are mostly based on recurring and repetitive simple guitar chords. Callahan is distinguished because of his baritone voice along with his rather depressing and gloomy lyrics. His lyrics are mainly written is a verse chorus form with lesser repetition of words. Lyrically he takes on subjects like politics, relationships, horses, teenagers etc. Due to his deadpan and emotionless delivery of vocals, his songs are considered to be intense and depressing. Even though in some of his lyrics touch of humor can be seen but due his feeling less delivery of words people and critics refer his humor as Dark Humor.

Callahan's song Bathysphere was covered by Chan Marshal, in Chan's 1996 album known as What would the Community think. And then 4 years later in 2000 on her covers album she covered another of Callahan's song called Red Apples. Quite a number of Callahan's songs were also used as original soundtracks of different movies. Callahan's song called Cold Blooded old times released in 1999 from his album Knock Knock was used as the soundtrack of the movie called High Fidelity released in the year 2000, directed by Stephen Frears.

Another of Smog's song called Vessel in Vain from his album Supper was inducted in as sound track of the Brit thriller called Dead Man's shoes that was released on 1-Oct-2004. Another of Smog's song called Held released on December 23 1998 from his album Knock Knock was featured in the commercial ad of Cadillac, later in the year 2007.

Bill Callahan's First Album came out in 1990 with the name of Smog. And after that, up till the year 2005, he released ten more albums with the name of Smog. His most recent album called Woke on a Whaleheart was released in April 24 2007. This was his first album which came out with the name of Bill Callahan rather than Smog.