Bill Callahan turned away from his lo-fi smog persona on his 1998 album Knock Knock, and this heartbreaking tune.

This is one of the most harrowing songs you’ll ever hear. And yet… its devastating lyric is deliberately set to a disconcertingly jaunty tune. Even when he starts to sing this heartbreaking child’s-eye account of domestic abuse Bill Callahan sounds… well, almost jolly.

Perhaps that’s the best way to deal with trauma.

When he released his seventh album Knock Knock in 1998 it was a departure from the maudlin minimalism of his previous six, with Jim O’Rourke producing a full band, and a children’s choir filling out the lo-fi sound.

He called it his “album for teenagers,” though that might have been pushing it; I suspect his tongue was firmly in his cheek. Teenagers don’t tend to gravitate to records by a fellow with the stage name “smog”.

Or to a song called Cold Blooded Old Times, with a lyric describing “the type of memories that turn your bones to glass” in heartbreaking detail:

“Mother came rushing in / She said we didn’t see a thing / Father left at eight / Nearly splintering the gate,” he sings, adding even more poignantly that “The little squirrel… understood every word.”

Musically, a guitar chugs with suggestions of Jonathan Richman’s Road Runner and/or the Velvets’ Some Kinda Love, or even Cornershop’s Brimful Of Asha, and a ghostly piano figure tinkles faintly, submerged deep in the mix, until a dull drone dominates the sound, as if attempting to erase the grim memories.

Listening again now, I realise that like many others I was introduced to the song by the film High Fidelity, in which it was featured.

Apparently Callahan wrote the song, and most of the others on Knock Knock while driving from South Carolina to Chicago after the end of his relationship with Chan Marshall, aka fellow musician Cat Power.

I’m guessing it was not an amicable split.