Bill Callahan Resuscitate! Vinyl LP 2024

Tracklist:

First Bird
Coyotes
Keep Some Steady Friends Around
Partition
Drover
Pigeons
Everyway
Naked Souls
Natural Information
Planets

The date was March 6, 2023. Bill Callahan strode onto the stage at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, flanked by Matt Kinsey on
guitar, Justin Laurenzi on tenor sax and Jim White on the kit. They all were feeling good, and it seemed like the crowd
was also. But that wasn’t all. They had some special surprises planned . . . take it away, Bill . . .

“This is a live album that was taken
from the tour for YTI?A??. Songs
tend to mutate after they’ve been
recorded. These songs were mutat-
ing faster than usual. Like whatever
happened to Bruce Banner in the
lab — I knew these songs were about
to get superpowers. As far as I was
concerned, this change needed to be
documented.
The best thing about documenting
something is that it gives the creator
permission to move on should they
wish to move on. I usually prefer to
move on.
These songs were recorded in
Chicago, America’s heart. And at one
of the best clubs in the country — I try
to only work with venues that are not
entangled with LiveNation/Ticketmas-
ter. Thalia Hall, baby. Stay free.
The date was mid-point in the tour,
so I knew we’d be as hot as we were
going to get. Not too green, not too
brown.
There was the thought, “let’s take
this op to make it something special.”
So we took advantage of Chicago’s
easily accessible players — we got
Nick Mazzarella to add alto sax to
one song, and from the opening band,
Pascal Kerong’A to sing on a song,
and Nathaniel Ballinger on piano on
one song — and I couldn’t pass up the
opportunity to invite Joshua Abrams
and Lisa Alvarado to play on “Natural
Information.”
The hardest part of making the
record was cutting songs out — it
could have been a triple album. But
I don’t know, maybe the show should
have been this short?”
—Bill Callahan