Amazing new Bill Callahan video directed by his wife Hanly Banks

Is anyone else slightly unnerved by how happy Bill Callahan has been of late? His songs no longer deal with loneliness and somewhat terrifying obsession and now dwell on nicer, every day things such as driving in the car with your loved one as a snoozing pillion passenger. Yes I know it’s nicer to listen to songs about that sort of thing, but I kind of miss wigging out to some of his earlier classics where he would, for example, go into stark lyrical detail about arranging a woman’s lingerie into the shape of a little dolly on the bed while she’s out.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that Bill is deeply content now, and it’s all down to his mega-talented filmmaker wife Hanly Banks. We interviewed Hanly in the first issue of Printed Pages about the documentary she made about Bill and we’ve been keeping a close eye on her marvellous photography and films since. This video, created and directed by Hanly and Chris Rusch, shows Bill as a planet, orbiting through space in solitude on the hunt for a female planet lost in the vast universe.

The charming stop-motion and the meticulous set that looks like what you want your diorama to look like as a kid is the perfect visual accompaniment to a witty song like Javelin Unlanding, and to a Callahan fan such as myself it’s pretty perfect. Even if it does remind us of the moon guy from The Mighty Boosh.