Smog's "I Break Horses"

I still remember first hearing this song. It went off like a bomb the first time I heard it. Like Palace Brothers’ “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow” there’s a spare, plaintive sadness in the song’s austerity, but it’s a much richer portrait.

Callahan presents an unreliable narrator who sounds haunted and weary of his philandering curse – “I break horses, I don’t tend to them, I break horses, they seem to come to me, asking to be broken.” Note that in the first verse, the ocean looks like tarnished gold. Things don’t shine for him anymore. There are these terrific backing vocals suggestive of a Greek Chorus as a “woah” track, pressing the pathos, as he brags on his gift.

“It doesn’t take me long, Just a few well-placed words,” he says, “and their wandering hearts are gone.”

It’s so shameless – and the break pleads his fickle case (“at first her warmth felt good between my legs”), how he just kinda grew bored, not his fault (“soon that warmth turned to an itch turned to a scratch turned to a gash”). The funny thing is, that Callahan’s wounded tenor is a great vehicle to sell contrition. He does seem genuinely hurt that he should be this character.

The last verse is a whole different tempo as he tries to separate like an older brother from a clinging sibling – “tonight I’m swimming to my favorite island, and I don’t want to see swimming behind.”

It’s all about withholding attention and validation. He’s perfectly culpable and presumably capable – should he try to tending to them or at least turn them away before he breaks them. He is the main character because he made himself this and if it’s undoubtedly a lonely place full of surface incantations but nothing that stirs the deep, it’s a place he chose for himself.

The kind of person who would choose that kind of life, would rationalize it in just this way, and it would be, when you think about it, sad, though they, if pitiful, aren’t really worthy of pity or redemption. And he just sort of disappears into the horizon line, slowly fading out.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find the emotional complexity of a song about a shallow man pretty striking, especially given that it’s done just a simple refrain and two distinct verses. It’s so damn economical, but it’s a five-minute song, which is a clue to how much the music and it’s slow change, like a book character being turned around in the light, allows time to see it wholly. (The Peel Session track is six-plus minutes!!)

I want to leave some room for Callahan to offer his own epitaph, which I find more illuminating than most songwriting reveals: “A song like "I Break Horses" has often been misconstrued. Some people tell me, "Ah, I get it– we are all murderers under the skin!" That's not it. I don't give a shit about people's dark sides. I wrote that song to help a friend try to understand how a guy she had a one-night stand with could possibly not return her phone calls the next day or ever again. There is also a lot more going on with that song, but that was the impetus. It is rooted in Good.”

Callahan is a fine artist and just below the S-Tier of David Berman and perhaps the Mountain Goats. There are several very worthy songs, but nothing quite as visceral as this surprising simple tune, and that’s one of my favorite things about it. The mood is powerful but created with just a few well-placed words.