Articles: A Window That Isn't There: The Elusive Art of Bill
Callahan  November 13, 2013 Photo by: Hanly Banks  "As a kid, I
was just a kid. Average."  This is the voice of Bill Callahan.
In person, it’s higher than it is on record, somewhere between
the chesty baritone of his recent work and the reedy plea of his
youth. In September, I met with the 47-year-old singer-
songwriter in the living room of an apartment on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan and talked to him about his childhood: He grew
up in Maryland and England, his parents both worked for the
National Security Agency, he lived in the suburbs. "High school
was terrible for me, like it is for all people, I guess. I was
just not happy," he tells me. But then something about the
sentence that followed stuck out. As a kid, I was just a kid. It
sounds like a line from a Bill Callahan song. Is he saying
"Let’s leave that alone," because there is something deeper he
doesn’t want to discuss, or is it that there is really nothing
there? Does it matter?   Peo