Until we have a feature film in which Bill Callahan’s words are spoken by the true and deep characters who exist within the songs, the best format will be this lyric book — wait, no, the best format will always be the albums featuring the songs, since they are sung by Bill Callahan, the author and singer, in his own inimitable and completely individual fashion. I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/ Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it’s a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy inkwash images by the man himself. The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan’s gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure. I Drive a Valence does this for the listener — makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan’s songs
on another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world.