Bill Callahan at Aviva Studios

Bill Callahan has always gone for titles with a bit of poetry in them – Dream River, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. Hi new record, My Days of 58, breaks the habit, taking its title from the age he’d just turned when he wrote it. It sets the tone for a record that gets right to the point rather than dressing things up in poetry.

For the best part of two decades, the Maryland artist’s music has been thawing out of the misanthropy of his Smog years, trading character studies of difficult men for a warmer, more domestic gaze. My Days of 58 pushes that gaze toward its unglamorous endpoint: mortality, family, the business of still turning up to sing. There’s little ceremony in any of it – mostly a dry laugh where solemnity might otherwise sit.

Most casual fans know Callahan for two things: 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, which is probably his most acclaimed album, and ‘Drover’, which soundtracked Netflix’s Wild Wild Country and reached more ears than his own records ever have. My Days of 58 isn’t trying to top either. It’s a dispatch from much further down the same road, the wary drifters of his earlier music now somewhat settled down, but still with new things to say.

Callahan built the record with the same musicians who toured 2022’s Reality – guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White. In these sessions, they worked from loose charts rather than fixed arrangements. Mistakes were left in as raw material. The aim, in Callahan’s own words, was to get “thrown out of Eden” – to let a take turn into something rougher and more human than where it started. It’s the same unpredictability he says keeps him making music at all, and it colours My Days of 58 with an unsentimental candour that befits the lyrics.

At Aviva Studios on 2 October, Callahan is joined by that same touring trio, with support from Nathan Bowles, a clawhammer banjo player and Drag City labelmate working a similar line between tradition and improvisation.