Knock Knock / Moon Pix
Album Retrospectives on a Sleepless Night
In the American South, there are two types of young people.
The great majority of them stay. They are the ones who find joy in getting married, having babies, and sticking around their elders. They are comfortable to be where they are and cohabit with the ones they love. They build beautiful lives surrounded by built-in communities and immediate friends. Soon, they get older and become parents and elders and community leaders themselves.
Then, there are those who leave—those who were never satisfied in the Podunk towns that reared them. Those are the outsiders, the misfits, the punks, and the untouchables. They run to New York, Nashville, Atlanta, LA, Chicago, and Orlando. They run from the past so they can meet the present and craft a future on their own terms.
Smog’s Knock Knock and Cat Power’s Moon Pix occupy some strange, alternative third space.
The same year Bill Callahan (Smog) and Chan Marshall (Cat Power), then romantic partners, moved to Prosperity, South Carolina to live together in an old farmhouse, I was born in a rural Appalachian town some two-hundred-and-sixty-four miles away.
After living together for a brief time, the two of them split. In the wake of their relationship, the details of which are obscured and not well known, they both wrote and recorded career-defining albums that interconnect like puzzle pieces. While each album tackles different themes, moods, and situations, there are a few common threads that tie them to one another.
For one, both Callahan and Marshall have admitted to having written several of the songs on these albums whilst alone: Callahan on a lonely road trip and Marshall during a single night. The mythologies of these albums are literally baked into their sonic landscapes. So too are the amorphous identities of Smog and Cat Power, monikers, yes, but also alter egos in their own right.
Knock Knock and Moon Pix feel weirdly aligned for having been written by two people having just called it quits just a few months prior to their writing and recording. It’s eerie. You can literally hear their influence on one another. Religious references are sprinkled liberally. Marshall begs for God amongst the raging, window shaking devils, while Callahan subtly hints at lower sins and the religious zealots of Foot Loose.
Celestial artifacts too are sown like seeds. “Metal Heart” and “Teenage Spaceship,” both Track Fives on their respective albums, sing to the stars and live their truths by the Moon. Sonically, these albums toe the line between vulnerable, stripped ballads and grittier, up-tempo numbers. Yet, they are distinct in the way these artists are distinct musicians with distinct creative impulses.
What exactly results from this ethereal blend of melancholy?
Knock Knock
Knock Knock is a nighttime drive on a highway—meandering, lonely, and uneven.
From the first note in “Let’s Move To The Country” to the final breath of “Left Only With Love,” Smog, aka singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, keeps the energy moving at a pace reminiscent of a road trip without a destination. Even the shifting tempos and alternating rhythms resemble shifting speeds through small towns and tuning the radio knob to find something worth listening to for a while.
Allegedly, Callahan once said Knock Knock was his “teenage” record. It’s hard to disagree when you hear some of the themes and lyrics on this album.
Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Callahan’s own adolescence is the song “Teenage Spaceship.” While simple and relatively bare bones in its instrumentation, this beautiful track follows “a teenage Smog” as he roams the neighborhoods of his town late at night. The spaceship metaphor captures both the idealism and isolation of youth. As the nucleus of the album, it is a deep rumination on the narratives we build around ourselves as we age.
The album twists and turns through up-tempo tracks that nip and speak volumes to the unspeakable. “Cold Blooded Old Times,” one of Callahan’s most well-known songs, tells a story of domestic violence from a child witnessing and experiencing it. “No Dancing” with its backing child choir and harsh guitar pits the speaker against another, perhaps a partner, as they passive aggressively waltz around each other during a tense moment. It’s an omen of things to come.
The final tracks on the album act as a series of stairstep kids.
“Hit The Ground Running” does just that—runs away at a steady, country rock-and-roll speed, away from the Southern “pit of snakes” the singer could never reconcile with his own politics and lifestyle.
“I Could Drive Forever” sounds like the moody middle child. It speaks to one’s reckoning with their avoidant behavior. “With every mile, another piece of me peels off and rips down the road.” Does he seek something specific or is he ambling towards something unknown? While his motivations for running are clear—he’s made mistakes and hurt people—his final destination is more nebulous. He cannot help but feel the call of the road and the leaving.
In the wake of a bitter ending, the singer drives further and further away, choosing what he perceives as the only option left in his emotional arsenal. The music builds and slows and builds again to a droning crescendo, closing in a sort of quiet solitude, as if he’s drifting off the road entirely and onto the shoulder.
“Left Only With Love” echoes out and ties up loose ends. In an unsent letter, presumably to a lover or family left behind, the singer sends love and well wishes. His anger has dissipated. In its place is acceptance—of what is, what was, and what could be. It’s a living prayer.
This album is a salve on my adolescent wounds. I cannot recommend it enough.
“I didn’t know how to be honest with myself and others, for the most part. Or at least there were certain personalities I couldn’t deal with in a healthy, self-preserving way. You can slip through the cracks and have a lot of adventures for a long time and when you get older you wonder if that was good for you, necessary, or a waste.”
-Bill Callahan
Moon Pix
Moon Pix is a siren song—startling, stirring, and altogether alluring.
In sharp contrast to Smog’s folk-rock highways, Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, sends off strange signals into the ether. With accompanying flute and omnipresent bass, Marshall charts a night of wakeful sleepiness where reality blurs into dreaming. Written almost entirely about a particular hallucinatory nightmare Marshall experienced while sleeping alone in their once-shared farmhouse, Moon Pix is a haunting trip through the cosmos.
To hear her tell it:
“I was by myself for three months in the country, surrounded by fields. One morning I had a vision, woke up and could feel something beyond the trees outside my window. Then I heard a voice: ‘Chan, come and meet me outside and all the past will be forgotten.’ I remember sitting up in bed and saying ‘No!’ And when I said that, I felt as if something was coming fast, straight from under the earth, these dark spirits. I know that sounds completely insane. So I sprung out of bed and rushed into every room [mimes shutting windows in a panic]. Then they came, thousands of them, all up against the kitchen window. They were clear, black as night, trying to get into my soul. That’s when I grabbed my acoustic guitar. I thought that if people found my body, I needed to leave a tape. So I just played the songs that became Moon Pix. It was horrifying.”
-Chan Marshall, in a 2013 interview with Rob Hughes of The Daily Telegraph
What was there on the tape? Likely, there were unintentional demos for the songs “No Sense,” “Say,” “Metal Heart,” “You May Know Him” and “Cross Bones Style.” These songs, the first three of which flow one right into the other, feature Marshall’s rhythm guitar most prominently. Sonically, the album folds around the listener with force, but it’s not entirely unwelcome. It’s dark and evocative. It’s also probably the closest we’ll ever get to knowing the inner workings of a one Chan Marshall as she debated leaving music forever.
Thank God she didn’t.
I read that this album was recorded over the course of four or five days in Melbourne, almost entirely live. You can hear it more in some tracks than others—”Colors And The Kids,” for example, is just Marshall at the piano. Despite its existential overtones, this song is a lighter tune off this moody album. However, like every other song on the album, it also commands every bit of your attention.
Marshall’s voice rings out like a songbird in some songs. In others, she hovers over the music like a fate. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell who’s the real Chan, and I think that’s purposeful. Given her inner turmoil surrounding her decision to return to music or abandon it entirely, this ever-shifting duality makes sense.
As a stereotypical indecisive Libra who also debated leaving music behind forever, this album sinks into me like a chilly autumn rain. I’ve heard it so many times, and yet, I feel that same feeling of instability and thoughtfulness I got the first time I listened to it. It doesn’t beg the listener to pay attention. It doesn’t need to. Rather, it summons you.
An album that wields such power isn’t rare so much as it is dangerously close to the edge. By all means, please listen, but do so with caution. Otherwise, you may just find yourself in the middle of a existential crisis on the Uptown A Train at 6:30 pm on a Tuesday.
The Leaving / The Going
Southern towns are built in circles.
It’s hard to get lost there because the highways always lead you to a backroad, dead end, or neighborhood you already know.
When I was learning how to drive, my stepdad would take me to long stretches of backroad beyond Highway 29 and have me drive the same two miles back and forth. By the time I had my license and a new used car, I was used to driving these backroads all up and down the state line.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I was looking to get in some trouble before real adulthood came to bite me in the ass. Up until that time, I was what you might call a loser. I didn’t go out often. When I did, it was always with fellow community theatre kids. I’d never had a boyfriend, nor was I ready to commit to my burgeoning bisexual identity. (Ironically, my sweet sixteen party was a women’s empowerment luncheon.)
When I turned 18, I got the adult version of Tinder and started a swiping crusade. I talked to college guys and lied a few times about how old I was to get them to keep talking to me. After a kind-hearted rejection from a grad student at UNC, I set my sights back on my own school. It was there that I actually reconnected with someone I’d known for years and pretty much disregarded our entire acquaintance. We bonded over 20th-century poets and Kurt Cobain. He played guitar and showed me all sorts of 90s grunge bands. It was, for all intents and purposes, the right kind of relationship for me at the time.
That Spring, my best friend and I would climb into my boyfriend’s too-big pick-up truck and drive around for hours after dark. Some nights, we drove to one of the area’s forbidden spots—Satan’s Bridge, named for its past as a site for satanic rituals and decades of layered graffiti.
Before these trips, we stopped at Sonic or Bojangles to grab dinner then drove to the 24/7 Hour Walmart to buy five or six cans of neon spray paint. We wandered the aisles together, all wild, stupid, and giggly. My best friend and boyfriend were part-dare devil. They were friends long before I entered the picture and always looking to one-up each other. I was the resident stick in the mud, always trailing behind them a few steps repeating the same old mantra.
“What if we get in trouble?”
Somehow, I was always convinced to join them in their semi-illegal escapades.
Spray paint and Pepsis in hand, we drove out to the state line and took the second left past the railroad tracks. We spray painted stupid smart kid shit we thought sounded intellectual like “Hypoxia will kill you” and “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Of course, it would all inevitably be covered up by moss and more graffiti. That was a given, but somehow, it felt permanent at the time.
Once, we drove out to my boyfriend’s grandmother’s house when she wasn’t there. It was deep in the boonies, far enough that the light from neighboring street lamps wasn’t visible. From the bed of his truck, you could see smatterings of stars in every direction. We laid out together and argued over constellations. “Which is the big and which is the little dipper?” “How do you find the North Star again?”
I remember the three of us talking about what we would do when we escaped the prisons of our strange, chaotic upbringings. My plan was in place— two college acceptance letters received and and the FAFSA application complete. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life but knew I would be getting out one way or another. Their plans weren’t so concrete.
The three of us headed off in a million different directions, choosing alternative paths and building lives outside the bounds of our initial ideals. We ended up in different states and different jobs entirely, but back then, we all felt the same.
Discovering Smog and Knock Knock a few years later was something of a dream come true for this restless teenage version of myself. There were so many times I felt estranged from the places where I grew up, never fully understanding the language or how to be exactly what they wanted me to be.
Likewise, just as Chan Marshall left her trauma-filled Southern home for greener pastures, I too felt the call of something other than. I too longed for an escape. I knew I would never be the type of person to revel in the idea of staying in or around the place I was born, so I left.
Years later, I look back on this time in my life and see a rebel trying to break out of her people pleasing ways. I’ve been lucky in that I found my way out of the South, finally. Still, I find myself homesick for it all the same. Sometimes, I wonder what could have happened if I chose not to leave.
Moon Pix and Knock Knock feel like kin to me. Their shared explorations of self, religion, environment, and community speak to what I experienced growing up in rural Virginia and North Carolina. There is a familiarity present in both works that I’ve attached myself to in moments of unbearable sadness and nostalgia.
This inner conflict has haunted the bulk of my adolescence and young adulthood. Yes, I could drive forever. Yet, I am left only with love for that place and everyone I knew. Time and age seem to have softened me, as have these remarkable albums.
I can only hope there are albums out there that have done something just as meaningful for you all too.
Great article. My favorite song by Callahan/Smog is "Truth Serum" on his 'Supper' LP. He is such a strong visionary. At times fun, other times biting and caustic. He always knows how to frame it, and when he needs to, he will have equal doses of humor with a serious sting in its tail.
Great article