Bill Callahan, March 8

Wednesday, March 8, 7 p.m.

Raccoon Motel 315 East Second Street, Davenport IA

Currently touring in support of his most recent album Ytilaer that Mojo magazine awarded five stars and deemed an "outright classic," singer/songwriter and guitarist Bill Callahan headlines a March 8 concert at Davenport's Raccoon Motel, the apocalyptic-folk and gothic county artist's latest also leading AllMusic.com to rave, "This is how an expert singer/songwriter captures the tenor of the moment: with songs of timeless quality."

Working in the lo-fi genre under the moniker Smog, the 56-year-old Maryland native Callahan released more than a dozen albums between 1990 and 2005. Smog's songs are often based on simple, repetitive structures, consisting of a simple chord progression repeated for the duration of the entire song, and Callahan's singing is characterized by his baritone voice. Melodically and lyrically he tends to eschew the verse-chorus approach favored by many contemporary songwriters, preferring instead a more free-form approach relying less on melodic and lyrical repetition. Themes in Callahan's lyrics include relationships, animals, relocation, nature, and more recently, politics, and on the subject of voice in his albums, Callahan has said, "It's usually one character per record. So the character appears in all or most of the songs on one record and then is gone. Though it makes me feel weird to talk about. Because I don't really think in clear terms of characters. My albums as a whole could be seen as one character with many voices."

In 2007, Callahan released Woke on a Whaleheart, his first solo album released under his own name. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle followed in April of 2009, and later that year, Callahan contributed cover songs on four separate tribute albums to Judee Sill, Kath Bloom, Chris Knox, and Merge Records. In 2010, he released his first live album Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, with 2011's Apocalypse inspiring critic Sasha Frere-Jones to call it "my favorite of Callahan's albums, not because it has better songs – those are scattered among at least five others – but because it does exactly what he wants it to do: it conveys an album’s coherence."

His followup to Apocalypse, Dream River was released in September of 2013, with a dub remix of the album Have Fun With God following in January, and in 2018, Callahan was featured in the Live at Third Man Records series. Meanwhile, Callahan has amassed some of his strongest acclaim to date for the backwards-titled Ytilaer, which led Joshua Pickard of Beats Per Minute to write, "Ytilaer finds Callahan at his most personally enigmatic, taking inspiration from his own life and filtering those experiences through a prism of modern folktales. He offers us all the most enticing details but manages to keep it wonderfully vague at the same time, a treasure trove of musical obscurantism."

Bill Callahan headlines his Davenport engagement on March 8 with an opening set by Pascal Kerong'a, admission to the 7 p.m. concert is $30, and tickets are available by visiting TheRaccoonMotel.com.