A double EP is always a little indulgent, but in this case we might forgive Bill Callahan a little indulgence. He’s been preoccupied these last six years, getting married and raising a son. Settling down.
Somehow, domestic life hasn’t seemed to have settled him. He seems to have experienced a flood of inspiration, and found the time to get it all on paper. All of it, it seems, expansively. “It feels good to be writing again. Clear water flows from my pen…” His latest release, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,, open and airy, sometimes a bit slight if you don’t listen close, sounds written by a man used to composing on long solitary walks who now steals quiet moments sitting at a table in a well windowed room, surrounded by comforting clutter.
Taken as a whole, this album is as vast, dramatic & poetic an album as could be written about a man taking on the mantle of family, community, blessings and loss. He is wryly reverent and open to simple truths and paradoxes simply stated. While each song has its own mythic core, the album is both referential to Callahan’s entire career and to itself. But for all the lyric grandeur, it is set to open and prosaic melodies, loping ballads, and shuffling rhythms. Musically, it settles comfortably in the background like a knowing and satiated observer. Tonal standouts are “Confederate Jasmine” with a slight rolling Hammond and a more active rhythm section, “Camels” which plays like a Mick Fleetwood soft blues number, and “The Beast” which builds darkly, and ends the album with over two minutes of major chord drone
Shepherd… was released digitally one side at a time, and each side has a loose theme:
Side 1, starting with “Shepherd’s Welcome”, lets us know what’s coming. He’s milled down those searching pines into a door and some floorboards. He’s going over the person he has been, shattering his own personal myths. He looks back like salt, but also sugar in “The Ballad of the Hulk,” ready to put the nonsense behind him.
Side 2 is a love letter in awe. Not just a husband and a father, he sings the majestic participation in the human story, slight as we may be. Starting with the divine “747,” he sings the light coming from all angles in his newborn son. “Watch Me Get Married” pulls the hat trick of being both stunningly romantic and devastatingly realistic. Side 2 ends with a certain statement about True Love, ‘…not magic, but certainty.’
Side 3 is a mature reconsideration of the person he tried to reject on side 1 — literally what comes after certainty (Callahan is never one to let a joke pass). He may be the family’s shepherd, but he’s the wolf in the house as well on “Confederate Jasmine”, howling at the moon and waking his sleeping wife for some primal, menstrual sex. He sees through all his old tropes — the stranger, the drover, the cantering horse itself, but he gives them their due as a part of himself that persists. “Call Me Anything” admits ‘I never was the things I said I was. But it’s not as if I lied. What I was, all I was. Was the effort to describe.’ But he goes on to reckon with himself. He is a man – a male member of this warring race, the cutting of the canyon inseparable from its grace. Side 3 ends with the elegiac “Circles” bringing to the center what’s been perhaps dogging the entirety of the album – that specter of death that accompanies all life, but most clearly haunts the lives about us we come to value.
Side 4 is pretty much a coming to terms with that promising loss. “When We Let Go” is almost a hymn. “Lonesome Valley,” a gospel folk song on the path to the hereafter, with any mourning replaced by Whitmanesque lightness. “Tugboats and Tumbleweeds” is a future instructional to his son, and “the Beast” is a tidy collapse of the album into two codas ‘Love changed me’ & ‘Til beast, released beast…’ where beast is just the inevitable, and taken as such, Bill is at a well tempered, and surely not blind, peace.
Bill Callahan (Mr. Callahan’s my father) has been exercising his lust, terror, awe and bemusement in concise and well built albums since the last days of Smog, but always as a single solipsistic man chasing women, wrestling with nature, contemplating birds and whistling into wells. Happily, he steps into a certain domestic tranquility with an expansiveness and wisdom that knows that he is as a well hewn roof-beam tenon joined into and above the four walls, windows and doors of a house that is home, but that he will always have been cut from a wild tree.
Bill’s current tour is basically a linear showcasing of the album, with a few songs removed and a couple classics well fitted in.
I saw him at both the Castro Theatre and the Gundlach Bundschu Winery on consecutive nights – vastly different venues.
Opener Meg Baird, of Espers and Heron Oblivion, played acoustic with a single capo-ed electric guitar backing. While the Castro swallowed them up and nearly flatten her into a generic acoustic warbler, a close listen showed stark well-crafted songs and a capable & haunting voice reminiscent of Innocence Mission. At the Winery they shined and filled the space with warmth.
Bill’s band – he did not introduce them, are a dazzlingly proficient guitarist playing off to the side, and a bonded together rhythm section consisting of a young drummer, and an upright bass player who I believe is Brian Beattie. He’s played on and done string arrangements for the last four Bill Callahan albums.
At the majestic Castro they played tight under the draping white curtain, blocked color lighting matching precisely the mood of the songs. I was surprised at the almost post-rock shoegaze tone. They played Side 1 consecutively and as on the album, a gentle build to an embellished “Ballad of the Hulk”. Then “America” as almost a straight rock song, and onto side 2. The seated crowd, mellow till then, was hooked with a dynamic “Watch me get Married.” A standout was “Drover,” the opening track off Apocalypse, made well known from Netflix’s Wild Wild Country. It was played almost as a suite with lighting and instrumental matching of three characters: the narrator, the breathing cattle, and the passing storm. They played out into the second half of the album with growing forays into tonal musical expeditions. As on the album, “the Beast” closed, and the band faded out in a gray ecstasy. The sold-out crowd had been fairly subdued excepting a drunk shouter asking for the hits(?) that Bill handled with unflappable dry humor. Despite a lukewarm crowd, the band came back out for a blistering encore of “Say Valley Maker” and a riffing “Riding for the Feeling’ Two of this reviewers favorite tracks.
At GunBun they played the same set but more fittingly looser. Members of Bill’s family were in the small crowd and the night had a true intimacy of connection to theme and meaning. On a warm clear summer’s eve, they wrapped up their set and went, wine-warm into family time and we dispersed like evening crickets.
