NAME: Bill CallahanPROGRESS REPORT: Releasing Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City), his 13th album (his second as Bill Callahan) on April 14. Recorded at The Track in Plano, TX and Cacophony in Austin, TX.Maybe it's his lyrics, which oscillate between downtrodden and vaguely threatening, or maybe it's his rich baritone voice, but Bill C...

Banhart kissed his beard goodbye, but the gender-bending/open-ended sexuality remains on "Forget About Him," his contribution to the Kath Bloom tribute CD Loving Takes This Course. The 16-song collection also includes Bill Callahan, Mark Kozelek, the Dodos, Josephine Foster, Scout Niblett, etc. If you're unfamiliar with Bloom, she's a Connecticu...

Photo by Lauren DukoffDevendra Banhart's handful of covers have always stood out to me more than any of his trippy originals. One-offs like "Fistful of Love" and "Don't Look Back in Anger" highlight his vocal nuances without letting him float around in the stratosphere. He needs these songs' rigid structures, and in turn he can loosen them from ...

Photo by Drew KatchenTuba-voiced depressive Bill Callahan used to call himself Smog, but he's been going by his given name ever since 2007's Woke on a Whaleheart. That change in moniker was supposed to signal a transition to happier music (or, at least, to less cripplingly bitter music), but in the time since Whaleheart, he broke up with Joanna ...

Few took notice when Kath Bloom retreated from the New York folk scene in the 1980s. Her disappearance is neither as romantic like Vashti Bunyan's bucolic sojourn nor as storied as Cat Stevens' conversion: On hard times, Bloom moved to rural New England to raise her sons. Two decades later, Australian label Chapter Music has reissued the bulk of...