The great noir novelist James M Cain was the rare writer whose own bizarre life story probably eclipsed that of any of his memorable characters. Even so, when lo-fi folk-rocker Bill Callahan opted to write his own tribute of sorts to Cain, he didn’t feel compelled to start a research project or dive too deeply into the long-dead author’s actual past.

“I was reading a lot of James M Cain at the time,” he told Mojo , referring to the track ‘Jim Cain’ from the 2009 album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle . “I didn’t know much about him or his personal life, so for the song, I just started musing on what little I knew about him and trying to write a song from his perspective and my perspective blended together.”

For Callahan, who by this point was already 20 years into his own prolific career (he’d released more than a dozen albums under the band name Smog as well as one prior solo record), an appreciation for Cain’s books—and a curiosity with his own amusing connections to the man himself—made for an interesting exercise. He would try to tell a bit of James M Cain’s story, in Cain’s own voice, but only by imagining what he might have to say, rather than reading old interviews. It would essentially be a fictional biography of a very real literary hero.

The only details Callahan had at his disposal were a few factoids he’d picked up over the years; quirky coincidences that increased his sense of kinship with Cain.

“He was born in Maryland, like me,” Callahan told Uncut magazine while promoting the album. “And wanted to be a singer. Like me. But was told he wasn’t good enough. Like me. He died in alcoholic obscurity. Hmm . . . no comments from the peanut gallery?! I also like that his middle name was Mallahan.”

Cain was indeed born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1892, the son of a college professor and an opera singer. His own career path proved much more meandering, as he found work as a miner, a record store clerk, a soldier, a gas company grunt, and yes, a singer, before stumbling onto his true calling.

“I had a pretty rough time because I didn’t know, nor did anyone else, that I was due to become a writer,” Cain told the Paris Review in 1977, shortly before his death. “I had several jobs that just made no sense. Suddenly, I decided to be a singer, sending my mother nuts. She said I had nothing for it. Turned out she was right, but she should have kept her flap shut and let me find out for myself. But then one day, just for no reason, I was sitting in Lafayette Park, and I heard my own voice telling me, ‘You’re going to be a writer.’ For no reason at all. Just like that.”

It was that period, when Cain began finding his voice (written rather than sung), that Callahan seemed to latch onto when writing the song ‘Jim Cain’, which begins: “I started out in search of ordinary things / How much of a tree bends in the wind / I started telling the story without knowing the end / I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again.”

Callahan’s distinctive slow-spoken baritone delivery is well suited to inhabiting the character of the tortured crime writer, who describes working “until I’m frazzled” and struggling to meet his own expectations. “I started running, and the concrete turned to sand / I started running, and things didn’t pan out as planned.”

Despite having many of his books adapted into hit film noir movies , Cain struggled to find much success writing screenplays of his own, and his personal life was equally fraught, with four marriages followed by a final ten years as a widower and bachelor, living alone but still writing well into his 80s.
Callahan, who was 43 when he recorded ‘Jim Cain’, related to that idea of loss and solitude at the time, as he was an ageing, single man in his own right.

However, that narrative soon changed. “My wife-to-be definitely heard [ I Wish We Were an Eagle ] and liked this record before I knew her, so a nice way of looking at the record is like the soil or seeds of the future,” Callahan told Mojo in 2023.

Concluding, “The goal was to have a distance on everything to see a bigger picture. When I started out, I was more about being sequestered and holding my cards close to my vest. I decided I could maybe get further in life if I was more open.”