Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest
Drag City – 14 June 2019
“Well it’s been such a long time, why don’t you come on in?”
And there it is, the supreme levelling baritone of Bill Callahan. Though six years and you don’t call? No, look, we understand – you’ve been busy. After all, what’s that they say about absence? Let’s just hope you have several of those trademark twisted ballads tucked away in that vest of yours, ready to make it up to your pining flock.
At 53 Callahan has uprooted “the pines of where did you sleep” and has raised a sanctuary of sorts for his wife, Hanly Banks (director of the Apocalypse tour documentary, no less) and son, Bass. On first impression, it would seem our once familiar ‘teenage smog’ is now but a wisp skirting the skyline and that ‘country kind of silence’ of his Eagle-Apocalypse-River years has broken to the life-altering bray of his new brood (along with the added clamour of “renovators, renovating constantly”).
However, this is Callahan after all – cut from the same wound dressing as Oldham and Kozelek – he hasn’t gone entirely rose-tinted on us. Across Shepherd… we’re ushered in by some of the most telling, intimate material he’s put to record. Which feverishly tosses from the matter-of-fact, to matters both, complex and abstract, as the instrumentation tunes in ever closer, enfolding with a soft caress, careful not to constrain or over-indulge. On Released against a minor chord fray he sourly cusses, “Any fool can see everything is corrupt, from the shoes on our feet to the way we get fucked” and spurred by snare-rim cracks he pleads, “I know that we are free. Don’t tell me again that we are free. Tell me, when will we be released?” That signature early-Smog tension, both inner, and spilling over dynamically, is still intact.
Though where his previous three albums dealt in expansive Great Plains song-suites and parabolic vignettes that could sometimes be found wandering into Zen Buddhist territory – “I started out in search of ordinary things. How much of a tree bends in the wind?” – now we’re treated to a double-LP of ‘epic miniatures’ that follow the same tender trajectory of songs like Small Plane, as Callahan delivers some of his most earnest songwriting to date. Released simmers down to the totally serene on What Comes After Certainty, our case in point and our Shepherd’s woolgathering heart, a song “…about what comes before certainty, what comes during certainty, and what comes after. That’s what the album is about”, confessed Callahan to Fader recently, now the candid interviewee.
In his synopsis, he touches on the unique way in which the songs play-out chronologically across the record. Apparently, during the recording process engineer/musician Brian Beattie might ask, “wait, has Bass been born yet?” trying to work the through-line of Callahan’s recent history into the conception of the album further. Or Callahan caught in the cross-fire of quiet contemplation on the first four songs might literally signal in The Ballad Of The Hulk, “well after this next song we’ll be moving along, out of this vein” before the dew-lavished arpeggios and scope of Writing, gently alters course.
Most obvious and emblematic though perhaps is What Comes After Certainty’s striking beauty and lyrical lucidity. There’s a subtle sensitivity and a playful insightfulness to it which echoes across the entire record, whether that be the first-light Iron & Wine-esque ease of Morning Is My Godmother or the confessional country sigh of Son Of The Sea. 747 pairs the imagery of waking up on a flight with the birth of Callahan’s son, whereas Circles is a heartening elegy to his late mother, where we follow him fumbling for answers, “A face as stark as genesis. And I can’t stop the quest. I mean, who can stop the quest?”
Smoothly reaching the same transcendent climes as many of Callahan’s longer spinouts, there is a preciseness to these songs as they deal with the grand and the grave – love and despair, death and new life – as the herdsman tries to manoeuvre his thoughts, his tone and continued use of symbolism ultimately suggesting: we cannot know one without the other. This is epitomised best on Hanly & Bill’s duet on old-time gospel classic Lonesome Valley, where the Callahan’s join together to sing of man’s isolation. Callahan recently described the song to The Quietus as “the shepherd of the album, and the rest of the songs are the flock…protecting them by being similar to them but much more wise.”
During the fated Apocalypse tour-doc, Callahan opened up about how mythology informs his work as well, “A year or two ago I decided that symbols are everything. That’s all we have. That’s how we communicate. Everything’s just a metaphor for something else” which drives home this Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest / ‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing’ image of Callahan, as both the stalking predator and the shared provider. The Beast then is our cathartic send-off – beginning with “love changed me in that battlefield way” and parting with the spiralling reiteration of “released beast, released beast” – which manages to masterfully add to the album’s open-endedness and counter the pent-up frustration felt around the midway-mark on Released.
This past few weeks since Callahan first invited us in with new material have been something of a whirlwind romance, though rest assured this isn’t just the honeymoon infatuation talking; Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest handles the vicissitudes of love and life with inimitable tact and charm as only Callahan can, resulting in a career-high that listeners are sure to return to for sanctum and solace for many years to come.
Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is out now (2xLP/CD/Cass/Digital)
Tour Dates
US:
13/6/19 Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, Pioneertown CA
14/6/19- 15/6/19 The Lodge Room, Los Angeles CA
17/6/19 Henry Miller Library, Big Sur CA
18/6/19 The Castro Theatre, San Francisco CA
19/6/19 Gundlach-Bundschu Winery, Sonoma CA
21/6/19 Wonder Ballroom, Portland OR*
21/6/19 Wonder Ballroom, Portland OR
22/6/19 Neptune Theatre, Seattle WA
5/7/19 Lawrence Public Library, Lawrence KS
6/7/19 Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis MN
7/7/19 Thalia Hall, Chicago IL
8/7/19 Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit MI
10/7/19 The Sinclair, Cambridge MA
11/7/19 Murmrr Theatre, Brooklyn NY
12/7/19 White Eagle Hall, Jersey City NJ
13/7/19 World Cafe Live, Philadelphia PA
14/7/19 Miracle Theatre, Washington DC
15/7/19 Miracle Theatre, Washington DC
16/7/19 Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro NC
17/7/19 Terminal Wes, Atlanta GA
18/7/19 Proud Larry’s, Oxford MS
31/8/19- 1/9/19 HOCO Fest, Tucson AZ
EUROPE:
29/9/19 Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland
1/10/19 Usher Hall, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
2/10/9 Albert Hall, Manchester, United Kingdom
3/10/19 Eventim Apollo, London, United Kingdom
5/10/19 La Cigale, Paris, France
6/10/19 AB Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, Belgium
7/10/19 Tivoli Vredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands
8/10/19 Admiralpalast, Berlin, Germany
10/10/19 Store Vega, Copenhagen, Denmark
11/10/19 Rockefeller Music Hall, Oslo, Norway
12/10/19 Gota Lejon, Stockholm, Sweden
13/10/19 Pustervik, Gothenburg, Sweden
*Early Show