Bill Callahan, Jerry David DeCicca @ Arts Club, Liverpool – 05/07/2025

Seated and leaning into the microphone, with a voice layered with honey and smoke, Bill Callahan sings, “It’s never easy to say goodbye / To the faces / So rarely do we see another one / So close and so long.” His words to Riding for the Feeling, like a knife through the heart.

It underlines the sombre feeling surrounding tonight’s show at Liverpool’s Arts Club. The city, still in shock from the unfathomable passing of Liverpool Football Club’s Diogo Jota and his brother, André Silva.

Sport and art intersect in few cities quite like Liverpool. The two, forever cross-pollinating, and whether supporters of Liverpool, Everton or Tranmere, it matters little. Life is life, and this week, the city tragically lost a good one. A wife lost her husband. Three children lost their father. A mother and father lost two sons. So while Bill Callahan playing on Merseyside is more like a collector’s item, still, tonight feels strange to be celebrating anyone or anything.

That’s the thing about Bill Callahan and his songs, though. Against all the odds as if some conjurer of magic, he has a peculiar way of guiding you into his world. One that freezes time where rich nostalgia and the warmth of A.M. radio consumes the body and mind. Even the artworks to era-defining releases, Sometimes We Wish We Were An Eagle (2009) and Apocalypse (2011), evoking the imagery akin to a Bob Ross painting to get lost in. The feeling of slower, more innocent times where the constant noise of the modern world is drowned out by nature and open landscapes.

Six Organs of Admittance: Time is Glass

And that’s what tonight is. A much-needed escapism, starting with Jerry David DeCicca who opens the show in support of his latest long-player, Cardiac Country. Led by album highlights, Good Ghosts and Frozen Hearts, BJ Cole’s masterful pedal steel is replaced by DeCicca’s harmonica, stirring the embers that provides the light to the main event.

While Bill’s YTI⅃AƎЯ tour saw him backed by guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and percussionist Jim White – the latter blowing minds just up the road in Manchester last week as a part of The Hard Quartet – like DeCicca, tonight Bill goes it solo. It provides an opportunity for him to bend his songs into new shapes and interpretations that even some of his most trusted follows haven’t heard over the years.

Ambling onstage to Warren G’s Regulate, and it’s no surprise. Bill, a sucker for ’90s rap, and in context, the cadence between this and his own songcraft strikes a certain similarity. Beginning with Sometimes We Wish We Were An Eagle’s one-two majesty of Jim Cain and Eid Ma Clack Shaw, Bill’s cracked brogue stuns the crowd into silence. The only noise, the clunk and drone of the air conditioning unit left of stage, which eventually gets the rightful treatment following Bill’s scowl in its direction.  

It’s the night’s only blip. 747, stripped to the bone and given a new life while favourite, Cold Blooded Old Times, is more like skeletal roadhouse blues as opposed to the expansive beast it is on tape. It’s the first of six Smog numbers; the tale of three in Red Apples, The Well and Say Valley Maker, a moment where Bill has the crowd eating from the palm of his hand in an environment so hushed, it feels more like a Low concert in a cathedral. So too with Sycamore and Coyotes. Songs that are like a prairie hum, while Natural Information is also dialled down to a slow-motion serenade.

Primitive Hiss: The Hazardous World of Bag People

Barring several brief interactions with the crowd, tonight Bill is mostly down to business. Following Teenage Spaceship, YTI⅃AƎЯ highlight Partition gets the necessary treatment (“Microdose / Change your clothes / Do what you got to do”) while Gold’s Cowboy sees Bill in gunslinger mode, and following the traditional cover of In the Pines, he thanks the crowd and exits the stage before returning for more.

Taking requests from the audience, it’s the most rabid and raucous demands I’ve ever seen, with song names colliding into a collective, incoherent caterwaul. It’s ironic that the request granted comes from actions and not words; a man imitating a bird, as Bill smiles and eases into the beautiful Too Many Birds. Encores feel like bullshit most of the time, but with a song like this and Let’s Move to the Country, well… who can argue? And closing with Smog’s River Guard, the night fades to a close, as Bill ends this 90-minute regale in what feels more like a half-an-hour.

This is what happens in Bill’s world, though. Time, preserved. His songs, as therapeutic as watching a campfire as flames dance and the wood crackles. And in a week of heartbreak where those of us on Merseyside wish for it to end, among the privileged few, ending it in Bill Callahan’s alluring world, where everything feels okay in the moment, is about as good as it gets.