This Is Our Jam: Bill Callahan, “Riding For The Feeling”

Wanderlust is as much a part of the American mythos as buying a house and settling down. Like the lone riders of the West or the beats of On the Road, Bill Callahan is well accustomed to the loneliness that comes with life as a peripatetic. Callahan’s brand of spare melancholy is saturated with inevitability. On “Riding for the Feeling,” Callahan sings, “It’s never easy to say goodbye" as if there was the remotest possibility he isn't leaving. Later, “Leaving is easy when you’ve got some place you need to be,” is itself an irony; Callahan needs to be anywhere but where he is. Like the gently gliding ski jumper in the video below, Callahan understands the emptiness of never having touched down in the first place. (Vice)