Smog returns with nature-inspired recording.

A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is Smog’s first mostly acoustic album in eight years. But Bill Callahan—who is for all practical purposes Smog—insists that he was not inspired to make an acoustic recording because of a resurging interest in folk music in the independent music community. Rather, Callahan, in a phone interview from his home in Austin, says he was compelled to make the album for a more personal reason: he recently purchased a classical guitar with a wide neck.

At times, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, featuring Callahan’s ultra-deep voice and nimble acoustic guitar playing, sounds a bit like a downbeat Leo Kottke. Talking about the release, Callahan believes there is something that an acoustic guitar brings to music that an electric guitar doesn’t.

“It seems to add more space for voice, I think,” he says after a long pause and a couple of “ums.”

While listening to A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, it becomes obvious that Callahan was influenced by something else while recording the CD. On almost every song, there are lyrics about the natural world. In the opener, “Palimpsest,” Callahan sings about feeling like a “southern bird that stayed north too long.” One of the album’s strongest tracks is “The Well,” a story song where Callahan describes discovering a well in the woods with extreme detail over sawing fiddle and rambling acoustic guitar. Callahan has a simple explanation for all of the album’s nature imagery.

“I moved into a house with the woods behind me,” he says.

One number on the release is a take on the traditional number, “In the Pines” (radically different from the version Nirvana did on their Unplugged album). Following a moment of painful silence, Callahan explains why he chose to record the song.

“I always wanted to do a traditional song,” he says. “It seems like it is hard to do a song that has been done by hundreds of people.”

The album also has the distinction of having been recorded at Willie Nelson’s studio in Spicewood, Texas. For Callahan, who began his music career as Smog with a tape-only release in 1988, it is a far cry from his roots as a low-fi independent music legend that recorded his first two releases at home on a four track.

SMOG CELEBRATES THE RELEASE OF his NEW CD, A RIVER AIN’T TOO MUCH TO LOVE, AT FERNWOOD BAR, 24 MILES SOUTH OF CARMEL ON HIGHWAY 1 IN BIG SUR, ON FRIDAY AT 9PM. $11/ADVANCE BY E-MAILING ABAGPRODUCTION@YAHOO.COM, $13/AT THE DOOR. 667-2422.