“And this must be the light you saw
Before our eyes could disguise true meaning.”
Returning from a five year hiatus prompted by a marriage and the birth of a son, Bill Callahan, seemingly content with his new lot in life, crafts a tranquil double album of odes to the quotidian pleasures of domestic life. Eminently palatable relative to much of his other work (under his own name or under his Smog moniker), Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest unfolds across twenty digestible tracks, some little more than a single verse or musical idea, most eschewing the standard verse-chorus formula in favor of amorphous shapes.
Acoustic instrumentation, an organic production aesthetic, and a sense of vocal and musical monotone mark the album’s overall texture. But even though the hookless songs, which all hover around the same tempo and key, tend to remain indistinct after a generous handful of listens, they create an effective overall mood that suggests each is a crucial weave in the tapestry (or maybe this is more of a quilt). When individual moments peek out from the rustic soundscape—an entire song dedicated Bill Bixby’s portrayal of The Incredible Hulk (‘The Ballad of the Hulk’); a stream-of-consciousness dream of signing Willie Nelson’s guitar (‘What Comes After Certainty’); a frank admission of how good it feels to be flexing his creative muscles again (‘Writing’), references to Sesame Street and period sex and a vision of a wolf poised in the shadows waiting to pounce (‘Confederate Jasmine’), a euphoric moment when his wife is videotaping him in the ocean on their honeymoon when he believes he sees the face of God in the sun’s reflection on a wave—they serve to remind the listener of the album’s surpassing warmth and meditative aura rather than its lack of variety. All of these hyper-specific snippets and apocalyptic imagery and deadpan line deliveries, which themselves deliver plenty of variety, give rise to a cascade of ideas and feelings that calls to mind the similarly confessional Carrie & Lowell from Sufjan Stevens or Benji from Sun Kil Moon.
A master of reiki,
Waved his hands all over me.
And said I eat too much steak,
And hold on too long to ancient aches.
And both are so hard on my heart.
But then even that statement is reductive and kind of inaccurate. Around the formidable core of Callahan and Matt Kinsey’s acoustic guitars, Callahan’s baritone voice, and Brian Beattie’s double bass, which are most prominent in the compositions, there’s a discrete but expansive and ultimately endearing repertoire of instruments deployed on the margins and in the background (Moog, banjo, bowed psaltery, harmonica, piano, mellotron, kalimba, lap steel, various forms of percussion).
It’s all subtly done, and once the album starts to sink in a little bit, the understated fills become delectable. At times scant instrumentation propels the arrangements forward. Even Callahan’s cadence seems to falter on occasion. And if the band didn’t consistently change chords at the same time you’d think maybe parts of it were improvised. Then a guitar will drop out of the mix and be replaced by a tasteful run of bass notes or arpeggiated chords will emanate from one of Callahan’s esoteric stringed instruments. This instrumental interplay reveals an intricacy that is belied by the informal presentation, resulting in a shaggy, ragamuffin quality that I find quite enjoyable to become familiar with. In effect, it feels as if every sporadic little flourish is its own little hook unto itself, relieving the tension of Callahan’s meandering song structures and giving the album a certain density.
And the gravestones from here look like teeth,
With a beast asleep at our feet.
Borrowed breath, borrowed thrones,
In the end, we’ll solely be,
To fill one another’s needs,
Sky to the sea.
Lyrically, Callahan is unusually voluble and vulnerable here, rooting his vignettes in his everyday life but also drawing on the riches of the unconscious human mind and all its weird musings and animal impulses. Remaining unchanged is the singer-songwriter’s ability to evoke and imply much with little. He does write with a certain specificity in many instances, but even his episodes of homelife are rife with larger, weighter connotations, of existential grappling with grave responsibilities and newfound susceptibilities.
The mundane givens of middle-class family life take on a nearly religious significance for Callahan. Love—which on Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle was “the king of the beasts, and when it gets hungry it must kill to eat”—is now a fearsome and beautiful thing, offering stability and tenderness but also requiring great personal sacrifice. Indeed, at certain points on the album and in various interviews, Callahan seems to think that his domestic responsibilities have the capacity to crush his artistic muse. And there’s always the eternal question of how the love shared between humans will persist in the hereafter.
Love goes on like birdsong,
As soon as possible after the bomb.
Nevertheless, despite a few tendrils of dread infesting his otherwise pastoral idyll of family life, in his view (which I am severely reducing here and is evidently murky to the man himself), love and devotion should be embraced. They’re cosmic forces that drive the shepherd to valiant protection of his flock—which, in the album’s valediction, entails the narrator, undaunted, confronting ‘The Beast’ while danger and death swirl all around him, knowing that his moment of serenity won’t last forever but believing that it is worth clinging to and fighting for. Death is inevitable, and no one knows precisely what comes after, but what a wonderful thing that we can carve out meaningful lives in the interim.
This is beautiful, generous, humorous, hypnotic, and authentic music. It’s deeply personal and yet mythic and possibly timeless—a wonderful insight into the mind of a supremely full-hearted man now in an exalted state whose past work suggested a loner who never smiled. This is not the same fellow who was “crawling through the desert without water or love” on Burning Kingdom.
Favorite Tracks: The Ballad of the Hulk; Writing; 747; Watch Me Get Married; Released; What Comes After Certainty; Call Me Anything; The Beast.