1001 Albums Summary

This album is a great introduction into the strange strain of Americana/Folk mastered by the likes of Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Tom Waits. The tone of the album is beautifully described by Callahan’s own lyric in the opening song “Jim Cain” in which he confesses, “I used to be darker / Then I got lighter, then I got dark again.” There’s a seeming ebb and flow between darker and lighter numbers, such as the humorously profound “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” followed by the ethereal esotericism of “The Wind and the Dove.” Callahan’s baritone voice makes this the perfect hypnopompic album for an autumnal bonfire or a case of white line fever.

I wanted to like this album more than I ended up liking it. While the vocal range of Prince is undeniably on display in “1999” there isn’t much depth beyond that. One detriment is that the first two songs on the album, “1999” and “Little Red Corvette”, are two of Prince’s most well-known hits and so the rest of the album feels like the producers quit trying and just threw some leftover material to fill the void. At best “1999” is a satirical hit-piece on the hypersexual pop culture of the 1980s—at worst it’s merely a product of that culture. If there is to be found any redeeming factor in this album it will be found in the song “Free” which balances the eroticism so signature in Prince’s artwork with a kind of activist edge. It’s almost as if Prince is still discovering his voice of the prophetic love that would become more apparent in his later work.