A Few Well-Placed Words: Listening to Bill Callahan's Resuscitate!
Bill Callahan has featured in the last three pieces I’ve written for Substack. He was one of the musicians whose songs I quoted in my piece on how the landscape feels when running. I featured his cover version of ‘Sea Song’ in my piece celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom. And a line from one of Callahan’s songs—‘I dreamed the perfect song’—was the inspiration for my last post on dreams and songs.
Given that Callahan has been occupying so much of my head space again, and given that he has recently released an excellent live album, I felt I should devote a piece of writing just to his songs. What follows is a review of the new album from the perspective of how it builds on longstanding Callahan themes. Following some of those themes takes me away from the immediate object of analysis, but that has become par for the course for Songs and Objects and I trust the detours are justified and interesting.
Resuscitate! captures, in edited form, a concert in Chicago from March 2023. The material is mainly drawn from Callahan’s then most recent album, YTILAER (2022), with just three songs from earlier records and only one from his Smog period.
Resuscitate! is a double album on vinyl, which is the format I’ve listened to along with the Spotify version when I was travelling at the time of the album’s release. With just ten songs across its nearly eighty-minute runtime, the first thing to note is the length of some of the tracks. While Callahan has recorded some longer songs throughout his career, the extension to these live tracks is unusual and stems in large part from the treatment given them by Callahan’s band for this tour. This is essentially a jazz/rock/psych band, with Callahan’s guitar and vocals complemented by Matt Kinsey’s electric guitar and effects, Jim White’s drums, Dustin Laurenzi’s tenor sax, and, for a few of the tracks, guest musicians.
A good sense of the directions the music will travel can be found on the record’s first side, comprising two songs originally from YTILAER, ‘First Bird’ and ‘Coyotes’. ‘First Bird’ opens with a snatch of live ambience (cheers from the crowd and the fading out of what I assume was the pre-show soundtrack), something always to note with live albums, no matter how familiar we become with them. It’s important that that sound is there and that it merges with the opening of ‘First Bird’, evoking the sonic palimpsest of a dawn chorus.
The band establishes a steady, propulsive drive and I am put in mind of other tracks that evoke the coming back into consciousness of a body via the emulation of a heartbeat; on one listen, I was reminded specifically of ‘First Breath After Coma’ by Explosions in the Sky. Slivers of sax insinuate themselves into the aural mesh, evoking both the song(s) of the first bird(s) and the anticipatory explorations of a jazz/improv gig.
It’s a thrilling start, lasting for a minute and a half before Callahan’s voice slides in to tell us that ‘we’re coming out of dreams’. The line repeats in subtle variations and then, just as Callahan is reaching the lyric about dreams being ‘thoughts in lotus’, the music blossoms into slow explosions of sound, soft squalls that threaten and smoulder with potential.
On ‘Coyotes’, there’s an even longer instrumental opening, with more than three minutes of sax-driven groove before Callahan croons his teasing opening line, ‘Yes I am …. your loverman’. What I appreciate about Callahan’s vocal delivery here is the separation he puts between line sections:
The coyotes are getting Bolder They come to watch The dog sleep
This first side of the record continues to be dominated by dreams and dreaming. The dog dreams of coyotes, of being a coyote. Callahan reminds us of a warning not to wake a dreamer, also telling us that what he has dreamed has come to be. It’s another song of domestic satisfaction, then, but also one about resuscitation, reincarnation, and immortality perhaps.
Up through the archives Holding hands through many lines And clusters or packs Of coyote bands
It may be just that I’m affected by my simultaneous reading of The Book of Elsewhere—the remarkable collaboration between Keanu Reeves and China Miéville—but I couldn’t help but think of the infinity of regeneration here and what that might mean for something as short-lived as a single, regular human or animal lifespan. A dream within the here and now of what came long before and what may come after.
In the final minute and half of this long (twelve-and-a-half-minute) version of ‘Coyotes’, Callahan growls and shouts and gets trancily repetitive in his embodiment of the ‘loverman’: an echo of Leonard Cohen’s ‘lover lover lover’ perhaps, but ultimately closer, in my mind, to something that Tim Buckley or Van Morrison might come up with, getting lost in the vocal bliss of repeating a word over and over and over until it loses meaning or takes on new ones.
Side 2 of the record opens with ‘Keep Some Steady Friends Around’, a track from the 2001 Smog album Rain on Lens. It’s good to hear some older Smog material incorporated into a set that is otherwise mostly promoting recent work. This song also prompts me to think of the longstanding tension between themes of lonerism, isolation and community that have been mainstays in Callahan’s work from the Smog days to the present.
To build your own house Might be the best Following your own design Like some kind of God With a fence all around A fence all around But don't forget to put in a gate Don't forget to put in a gate So you can have some steady friends come around
Callahan’s dry wit is on display here, as is that regularly appearing isolation/community trade-off. I think back to the 1997 Smog album Red Apple Falls and its constant return to that awkward tension: the way Callahan sings ‘I find myself isolated / Isolated in these fine, fine days’ in ‘Finer Days’; the sinister newcomer in town in ‘I Was a Stranger’; the character in ‘Ex-Con’ who feels like he’s casing your joint or about to abduct your child and who admits that ‘alone in my room / I feel like such a part of the community / But out on the streets / I feel like a robot by the river’.
That kind of character and those kinds of characteristics never quite disappear from Callahan’s work, even when he starts to sing about people who seem to have found a more settled sense of their place in the world. The narrators of songs like ‘Pigeons’ and ‘The Mackenzies’ (both on 2020’s Gold Record) are men who’ve settled yet who retain a kind of outsider’s restlessness: the limo driver who imparts his wisdom to newlyweds and then drives off alone in ‘Pigeons’; the self-diagnosed ‘type of guy / Who sees a neighbor outside / And stays inside and hides’ in ‘The Mackenzies’.
‘Partition’, another YTILAER cut, is a thrill ride, and proof that this concert and this album are really about showing what shapes these songs can take, what journeys they can go on with this group of musicians assembled. As Callahan noted in a 2022 interview, his desire with taking these songs on the road was to ‘make a little noise’, and that’s certainly on display in several of the cuts selected for Resuscitate!.
‘Drover’, from the 2011 album Apocalypse, is another exploration of what the band can do with this material, building on the already notable pace and delivery of the studio version to take its listeners out into the world its narrator inhabits.
For me, this soundscape-as-landscape connects to the evocative scenes by artist Paul Ryan that Callahan has repeatedly used for album covers (see more on Ryan here). Callahan writes the following in the liner notes to YTILAER:
‘Paul Ryan’s art is as alive as the subjects he paints. The flora grows and dies because the painted skies really rain … Another [facet] is the exhilaration and dread. It can be waiting for you anywhere. But it waits for you particularly in spots of sublime beauty—shores, mountains, mid flight birds—and maybe most of all—in human faces, in vision. It travels both ways like that. It’s awestruck at the beauty and brutality in equal measure and how they co-exist in one breath.’
I wonder to what extent Callahan might be thinking of his own art here, too.
The first side of Resuscitate!’s second record opens with ‘Pigeons’, one of my favourites of Callahan’s later songs. I feel I could write a post the size of Texas about it, so I’ll try to restrain myself here to some main points that can mostly be heard in the half-minute clip below. One is the spoken first line/intro (‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’) and what it tells us about voice; another is the rhyme scheme that Callahan employs for the first half of the song;1 a third is the way be plays with language, here most obviously through breaking the word ‘Antonio’ into two parts.
I should also mention the distinctiveness of the first sung line, with its exploding pigeons, but I’ll skip further commentary on that and go for the ‘o’ rhyme that gets set up almost unnoticeably with the ‘ode’ of ‘exploded’, and then more obviously with ‘Antone’ and ‘io’. As the song progresses, we get a bunch of these ‘o’ sounds: go , don’t know, go [again], limo, ceremony, phony Alamo, Mexico, flow, drove. That may not look like a huge list when compared with more wordy songs or genres (hip hop, for example, with its stacked rhymes and half-rhymes), but the casual pace of ‘Pigeons’ and Callahan’s drawn-out delivery combine to make it feel epically sustained.
Not always drawn to rhyming in his songs, Callahan does it brilliantly and extensively in ‘Pigeons’. In the second half of the song, the rhyme shifts to a different sound—spell, well, tell, hell, tell, hotel—before returning to the first rhyme scheme with the closing couplet ‘And I drive off alone, but I'm not alone / Sincerely, Leonard Cohen’.
Callahan is also well aware that songs, as timed, paced and organised sound, can rhyme in ways that won’t always show on the page. His delivery often draws out a rhyme, or something close to it, meaning that the more obvious examples I’ve mentioned here are multiplied. There’s also the way that the other instruments help lines to rhyme or offer responses to the call of the words in ways that seem, again, to multiply the things that are being said. In ‘Pigeons’, that happens most evidently with Matt Kinsey’s country-flecked guitar, which brings a slow burn to the song.
The way Callahan plays with words, with their phrasing and pronunciation, is key to a song like this. There’s the example I’ve already mentioned in the opening line, and there’s the unexpected appearance of the word ‘plenipotentiary’ later on.
That word, unusual to find in a song (or in many situations I suppose), offers surprise but also a rhyme for ‘marry’ and a container for another ‘o’ sound. Callahan could have used the schwa sound here, but doesn’t: that ‘o’ is an ‘o’.2
The sense of play, of having unexpected words or sentences in a song, is present in the framing of the song by the ‘Johnny Cash’ opening and ‘Leonard Cohen’ closing. These are lines that many listeners will know: Cash’s famous opening remark from his concerts (and the title of one of his albums) and Cohen’s equally famous sign-off to ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.3
These aren’t just any singers or writers that Callahan is invoking. They are models of a kind of voice that he has increasingly adopted, both in songwriting and singing. Like those writers, Callahan is drawn to a fairly minimal and direct lyrical style (Cohen has many very wordy songs in his catalogue—and Cash has a handful too—but I’m thinking of Cohen’s later work here, which was marked by a more minimalist approach).
As for voice, these are all singers who started off deep then just became deeper and deeper. As I’ve written before, when Cohen’s You Want It Darker came out in 2016, I had the feeling that ‘Cohen would continue to live until his voice became so deep we humans could no longer perceive it. He would disappear into the depths of his own voice’. There was something of that with Cash too, and Bill Callahan appears to be moving in a similar direction.
These are all examples of what I call ‘late voice’, a voice that carries the weight of time, age and experience. That doesn’t have to be a deep masculine voice—I’ve written about the late voices of singers such as Sandy Denny, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith—but, in the cases of Cash, Cohen and Callahan, that deep voice is a large part of what registers as the voice of experience.
It’s also a voice of seduction, the soothing bath (or balm) that draws listeners in. Like the storyteller in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, who ‘catches one in three’ passersby, there’s a magnetism to the tale that Callahan spins. Perhaps a more obviously American archetype would be the storytelling cowboy. I’m not the first to draw a comparison between Callahan and actor Sam Elliott (though I wouldn’t have described either as a ‘booming tenor’: baritone seems apter). Like Laura Snapes, in her review of Resuscitate!, it’s Elliott I hear in the narrator of ‘Pigeons’: the rambling cowboy tale-spinner so well shown in the opening to the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski.
Listening again to Elliott’s opening narration with Callahan in mind, I’m drawn not only to the depth of the voice and the laconic delivery, but also the wry play with words and names: ‘‘Los Angeles’ for Elliott, ‘San Antonio’ for Callahan.
And with that seducer’s voice comes a memory of Callahan’s song ‘I Break Horses’, with its line that goes ‘Just a few well placed words / And their wandering hearts are gone’. What a great line to hear in a song: the singer as horse whisperer; the audience as wandering hearts to be won over.
As well as placing his words in songs and on lyric sheets, Callahan has published a book of lyrics and drawings. I Drive a Valence, published by Drag City in 2014, gathered the songs that had been released under Callahan’s own name and as Smog up to that point. As with any songwriter, it’s interesting to see how the lines are set down on the page. For me, Callahan’s verses work well this way due to not being over-reliant on strict meter or rhymes. They can stake a claim to page space in ways analogous with how they play with space and time as audio objects.
When I read the collected lyrics, I tend to think about recurring themes in Callahan’s work, such as road imagery, being on the move, being a stranger, the role of landscape and wildlife. Horses and birds appear a lot in lyrics, drawings and album artwork, and Callahan occasionally asks us to adopt the perspectives of his nonhuman characters. There’s a drawing of a bird and a human in I Drive a Valence that bears the caption ‘I wonder what kind of human that is?’ Whenever I see it, I wonder whether it’s the bird or the human who is speaking. Or perhaps a different figure: the artist asking questions of his own work.
Another recurring feature is the mixing of the everyday with the strange, often through the use of unusual vocabulary. This is something that Callahan has in common with another of my favourite singer-songwriters, Richard Dawson. I’m not sure that Callahan ever produces quite the same poetry of the mundane that Dawson achieves, though that feeling may come as much from my getting more of the British cultural references that Dawson uses and from those references being more uncommon in the broader popular music sphere than the Americana that Callahan trades in (Americana, after all, is a globally dominant pop culture trope however localised it may sometimes be).
Callahan reminds me at times of an American lineage that would include minimalist, imagist and realist writers, people as varied as William Carlos Williams, Edward Hopper, Raymond Carver, James M. Cain (the influence on Callahan’s song ‘Jim Cain’), Jim Harrison, late Leonard Cohen, and Willie Nelson. Voicewise, as noted above, he’s Cohen crossed with Cash, a bit of Kris Kristofferson and Larry Jon Wilson too, the echo, perhaps, of a Cave. All masters of the well-placed word.
As printed in I Drive a Valence, the ‘well placed words’ line from ‘I Break Horses’ has no hyphen. I don’t know if it was that small detail, but something got me thinking about wells as I read the lines. As in holes in the ground used to source water. I thought of words placed in wells: deep, hidden, stored up, waiting to be drawn to the surface, of language always in danger of becoming stagnant, and how a writer uses their gifts to try and avoid that, to stay fresh.
Then I remembered that Bill Callahan has a song called ‘The Well’. It’s on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005). It’s partly about trying to make things work again, partly about finding the right words to shout into a well. You could say, I suppose, that it’s about well-placed words. Suddenly my thoughts of wells and placing didn’t feel like such a stretch. I still missed that hyphen, though.
Scott Bunn has written brilliantly about ‘The Well’ in one of his series of ‘recliner notes’ on Bill Callahan. At the start of his piece, Bunn quotes Raymond Carver on finding art in everyday objects. That resonates with what I’m saying here about writers like Callahan and Dawson. Bunn connects that idea to the topic of writer’s inspiration (and block) and what happens when the well runs dry. I’d also add that Callahan’s writing about writing in ‘The Well’, together with a conversational style that works as well on the pages of I Drive a Valence as it does as audio, reminds me a bit of some of Charles Bukowski’s poems.
There’s another kind of minimalism to speak of, one that might help steer us back towards the soundscape of Resuscitate! That’s the idea, prevalent in musical minimalism, of using small blocks of words, sounds or drones in combinations that repeat and mutate. It’s the sound of La Monte Young’s music, of Steve Reich, John Adams and Terry Riley. It’s an approach to music making that’s followed by Joshua Abrams and his group Natural Information Society, who I’ll come back to shortly.
Callahan can be thought of as minimalist in both his cowboy-of-few-words persona and, more formally, in terms of how he uses words, phrases and musical units to create the subtle pattern changes reminiscent of musical minimalism. While I’d argue that this approach is evident in many of his songs, perhaps the most graphically explicit would be the sections from ‘Fool’s Lament’ and ‘Too Many Birds’ where lines are reduced or expanded incrementally. In ‘Fool’s Lament’, a track from the ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ maxi-single, a verse which describes a sculptor chipping too much material away, is performed (and written on the page, in I Drive a Valence) in a way that enacts the reduction it describes:
Here we see the song as sculpture, well-placed words as visual units. And here we can hear it too.
‘Too Many Birds’ takes the contrary route, building lines up bit by bit:
And here is how that sounds.
Callahan’s words—whether on the pages of his book or the inner sleeves of his albums or pouring like honey from the speakers—have the sense of being just right, the only choice that could have been made at that point in the song. This is true even when they contain surprises—words like '‘plenipotentiary’—that take them beyond the ‘invisibility’ of songful words.4
‘Everyway’, the next song on Resuscitate!, is another track from YTILAER. Its opening lines are ‘I feel something coming on / A disease or a song’. That’s a great line for me to hear because it resonates with something that drives my whole ‘Songs and Objects’ project: the idea that songs, like diseases, can be viral, can be things that we can catch, that come on to us, that attach themselves to human and nonhuman hosts as part of their survival mechanism.
Other than that, I find ‘Everyway’ a kind of abstract song. I’m not sure what I get out of it lyricwise, though I do like the lines about being elbow deep in horse’s innards, and I admire the turn of phrase that results in ‘habit of force’, as well as the rhyme of ‘force’ with ‘horse’, ‘divorce’, ‘course’ and ‘source’. Again, for me, in this rendition, it’s the sound that pulls me in and keeps me there for nearly six minutes: the sound of Callahan’s voice on those fairly minimal lyrics and the sound of the band as they create a slow glide that makes the song seem to shimmer.
This seems a good place to note the extensive use of delay in these performances. There’s a (to me) slightly confusing credit on the rear sleeve of Resuscitate! that reads ‘212ms delay’. It’s next to a partial backlit silhouette of Matt Kinsey, who is also shown to the left of this silhouette, where he is credited simply with ‘guitar’. There’s clearly some play going on with this image, splitting and ‘delaying’ what would otherwise be a single photograph of the band to create two Kinseys, a partially doubled Jim White, a regular Callahan, and a split Dustin Laurenzi, none of them clearly visible because of the lighting and treatment. I’m unsure whether this is meant to act as a visual metaphor of the sonic manipulation that Kinsey in particular brings to the band’s performances with his range of pedals that split, echo, dub and otherwise mutate his guitar parts.
This ‘dubbling’ recalls, for me, Callahan’s strange album Have Fun With God from a decade ago. A dub version of the Dream River album, Have Fun mainly served to centre and fetishise Callahan’s voice even more than the often stripped-back instrumentation he habitually dressed his songs with. It was another way of doing song sculpture, Callahan and his producers chipping away at the various sonic blocks, in search of the ghosts of songs in time-honoured duppy fashion.
‘Everyway’, here, offers a less challenging use of delay, reverb and dubb(l)ing, providing instead a neat weaving together of minimalist song and echoey sound chamber. This feels like addition rather than subtraction, the song dressed in new clothes, renewed in every way.
‘Naked Souls’ starts out by maintaining the relative calm set up by ‘Pigeons’ and ‘Everyway’ before developing into something tenser, more frenetic and multivocal. Callahan is joined on vocals by Pascal Kerong’A, who also opened some of the shows on this tour. Callahan uses Kerong’A’s presence like he used the rest of the band in ‘Coyotes’, to take leave of the main song narrative and go all Buckley/Morrison again: ‘nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked nakednaked naked …’
There’s another guest on this track: Nick Mazzarella, part of the recent lineup of Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society as well as an impressive bandleader in his own right, whose alto sax takes beautiful flight from around the halfway point.
There are two tracks on side four of Resuscitate!: ‘Natural Information’ and ‘Planets’. Both are excellent examples of the interweaving of collective voices and both benefit from additional guest musicians. ‘Natural Information’, appropriately, includes two members of Natural Information Society, Joshua Abrams on guimbri and Lisa Alvarado on harmonium.
Natural Information Society, as self-described on the band’s website, ‘creates long-form psychedelic environments informed by jazz, minimalism & traditional musics’. I’ve listened to most of the albums the band have released over the last fourteen years, as well as watching videos of their performances on YouTube, and I love the way they create trance-inducing and time-altering pieces through the gradual build up and interweaving of seemingly simple musical parts. I find the involvement of Abrams, Alvarado and Mazzarella in the Resuscitate! concert gratifying and appreciate the confirmation of what had previously been speculation, that Callahan’s ‘Natural Information’ had been a nod to these musicians. But while the added musicians on this performance undoubtedly thicken the texture of the song, the most notable elements for me, outside of Callahan’s energetic strumming and catchy vocal, come from the interplay of Laurenzi’s tenor sax and Kinsey’s guitar.
There’s a line in ‘Natural Information’ that goes ‘I wrote this song in five and forever / I'm writing it right now’. That ‘writing it now’ jumps out at me as it speaks so well to the idea of group exploration and the unfolding of time and experience through collective improvisation. At the same time, it makes me think of how all of those involved—songwriters, singers, players, Thalia Hall audience members, Resuscitate! listeners alike—are equally writing the song now, making sense of it in the present. We are all, to use Christopher Small’s term, musicking, that vital process-oriented aspect of what songs and objects do.
At nearly ten minutes, album closer ‘Planets’ is another long track. There’s a mellow, stately pace for the first few minutes which then gets disrupted as the band move towards full-on skronk, only to slowly work itself back to mesmeric calm. This is the track that feels most like the band (with the addition now of Nathaniel Ballinger on piano) has taken over the proceedings, moving Callahan’s song objects into new processes, possibilities and orbits.
Scott Bunn has written a great piece on ‘Planets’, which also discusses Natural Information Society. He suggests that the performance of ‘Planets’ on Resuscitate! sounds more like NSI than ‘Natural Information’ does: ‘ The channeling of the sound of Natural Information Society into “Planets” fulfills one of Callahan’s goals for YTILAER, to be more deliberate about the comprehensive band sound’. I’d go along with that.
And then it’s done. The music ends, the crowd cheers, the needle follows the groove to the runout, and we leave the extended dream of the live recording.
Ex-Plainer / Dis-Claimer
I first heard the then-newly released live album by Bill Callahan in July while working on some other pieces of writing and doing some non-writing things that were keeping me super busy and super stressed. I felt something coming on. Was it a review of the album, a broader reckoning with my appreciation of Callahan’s work over many years of listening, or something else, something more amorphous?
I started writing and concrete thoughts turned to sand. Time went on and the superstressing only increased. There was the three-year Head of Department tenure to close down, the three-day conference to run, the half marathon to complete. A lot of things were coming to a head in early September as the days started to get shorter in North East England. These things crowded writing out for a few weeks and, when I got back to it, I had to wonder whether it was worth it. Who needed a review of an album that other writers had evaluated a month or two before? Who needed an album review that couldn’t stay on task, that rambled too widely and got lost in the thickets? Who needed my thoughts on Bill Callahan when there were already so many others out there, better informed and better written?
When all that was over, when the race was run, I felt something else coming on and it wasn’t a song. It was illness, my body telling me what I already knew, that I’d put it through too much in recent weeks and it needed a rest. Now my head was too foggy to write clearly, my energy levels too low to finish the piece off. I’d written more words in less time several times before, but this piece felt like its own kind of marathon, and my attempt to complete it a stubborn refusal to let go. I lay in bed and sweated it out.
And then, as I lay there with my headphones on and sank into the squall of Resuscitate! once more, I decided to finish it off. So here it is, for better or worse. And that about does her, wraps her all up. So here once again, is Sam Elliott’s Stranger in The Big Lebowski, getting lost in rambling (again).
I happen to find rhyme schemes interesting, though I’ve been told by at least one commissioning editor that the topic is too niche and boring for readers. That’s too bad: as a writer and a reader, I want to highlight the craft of other writers when I see it and hear it.
It’s ‘L. Cohen’ in ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, it’s ‘L. Cohen’ in the version of ‘Pigeons’ that appears on Gold Record and in other live Callahan performances, but it’s ‘Leonard Cohen’ on Resuscitate!
By 'songful words’, I’m thinking of some of the writing about song that has been published by Lawrence Kramer and Lars Eckstein, among others. I’ll take this up more fully in a future post.
"I feel I could write a post the size of Texas about it"
I appreciate this post, and am still working my way through the music, but my first introduction to Bill Callahan was Gil Scott-Heron's excellent cover of "I'm New Here" the title track from his late in life comeback album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_astp3BjM
Another deep dive that has introduced me to newer material by Callahan I have yet to explore. I will no doubt return to it as I investigate the work you discuss that I am unfamiliar with and this new live LP. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the obvious labor of love this piece has been.
My favorite song by Smog is "Truth Serum" from his 'Supper' album. I love the sense of play, yet there is also a profoundness in the questions he asks throughout the tune. But that is going back now. I haven't kept up with his discography, but the albums I own I really enjoy. I think I told you this before, but I discovered Callahan via an early Flaming Lips EP from 1994 called 'Providing Needles For Your Balloons.' On it, they do a Callahan song called "Chosen One." At the time, I was a big Lips fan, and if they liked Callahan, I needed to check him out.
I also really like your section on rhyme. It made me think of the wonderful song by Love, "Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale," where Arthur Lee never mentions the rhyming word but instead leaves it unsaid, allowing our mind to fill in the blanks.
And I completely understand what you mean by voice being a huge part of the experience. Callahan's deep baritone adds a huge texture to his often gentle music (the tracks I listened to in your post were more electric, but his voice still dominates and resonates). I feel the same way about Mark Lanegan's voice that reeks of whisky, cigarettes, pain, and a life filled with trauma and addiction. Lanegan's voice becomes the passport that transports us to his (and our) dark and uncomfortable spaces. I don't know as much about Callahan's life as I do Lanegan's, but I agree it is deep but more gentle and soothing.