“Well it’s been such a long time—why don’t you come on in?”
Those are the uncommonly inviting first words on Bill Callahan’s new album Shepherd in a Sheepskin, a 63-minute collection of songs as laid-back and neighborly as an impromptu summer barbecue. Callahan lazily strums an acoustic guitar as he gives us the grand tour in his patient baritone: “I kept the old door … and I cut down the pines to make a new floor.” The song is called “Shepherd’s Welcome,” and it’s a kind of sonic foyer, a brief introduction to the space of the record, Callahan’s first in six years. In the past, especially in the early days he was releasing music under the name Smog, Callahan’s lo-fi collage-like music could come off as abrasive, even purposely antagonistic toward the listener—see, for one example of many, “Disgust,” a 49-second song from his 1995 record Sewn to the Sky, which consists of a single droning chord and Callahan mumbling barely audible lyrics like “I don’t want you.” (Don’t get me wrong, this approach had its charms.) In comparison, “Shepherd’s Welcome”—why don’t you come on in?—has the feel of a folksy rewrite to the theme song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
The now 53-year-old Callahan’s music hasn’t mellowed with age, exactly. But the smudges on the lens through which he takes his naturalistic snapshots have been polished. Take Apocalypse, his excellent 2011 album, a restless wanderer’s vivid American travelogue. “All this leaving is never-ending,” he sings during the quietly stirring “Riding for the Feeling,” though not seeming too broken up about it. Callahan’s music, like the character he embodied in these songs, was a perpetual motion machine. Apocalypse’s slow-burning finale, the nine-minute “One Fine Morning,” might be the loveliest song you’ve ever heard about the end of the world. “The curtain rose and burned in the morning sun, and the mountains bowed down, like a ballet of the heart,” he sings. “When the earth turns cold, and the earth turns black.” The imagery is as stark and elemental as the landscape itself.
That, too, was something he arrived at gradually. Some of that early Smog material had the feel of having been created by an asocial shut-in: “Alone in my room, I feel like such a part of the community,” went a memorable line from his 1997 song “Ex-Con,” “but out on the streets I feel like a robot by the river.” Eventually—and especially when he started putting out music under his own name, beginning with 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart—Callahan’s records became more and more outdoorsy. Animals came to outnumber other people in his songs, and natural phenomena like rivers, trees, and seasons took on anthropomorphic qualities. (Callahan, too, sometimes longed to be something bigger than human; “I feel like the mother of the world,” he sang, tenderly, on the great final Smog record, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love.)
One of my favorite Smog songs, 20 years old this year, now sounds to me like a transitional moment in Callahan’s development, combining the hypnotic, homespun loops of his time as a bedroom musician with the gentle acceptance of a larger kind of awe. It’s called “Held”:
For the first time in my life
I let myself be held
Like a big ol’ baby
I surrendered
To your charity
I lay back in the tall grass
And let the ants cover me
I let the jets fly
I’m wishing for their destruction
I love this song, find it as calming as a koan. It makes me think of floating in still water, or that famous Willa Cather passage from O Pioneers!, about how happiness is simply “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” I had always just assumed, though, the song was about surrendering to the goodness and love of another person. It did not occur to me until I revisited it recently—after hearing Shepherd in a Sheepskin, a record that finds Callahan repeating the phrase “watch me get married … to the immensity” and “morning is my godmother”—that “Held” could just as easily be a love song to the sturdy earth itself. I surrendered to your charity; I lay back in the tall grass and let the ants cover me.
This could all so easily become pretentious and grandiose, except—blessedly—Bill Callahan is funny. He has one of those slow, barrel-age voices that primes you for profundity, so that whenever he works in something as banal as a human foible or a pop cultural reference, it becomes a laugh line. Take Shepherd’s great “The Ballad of the Hulk,” a pleasantly meandering tune that has moments of both humor and gravitas. You never really know which one’s coming next. “The master of reiki waved his hands over me and said”—you lean close, hoping to catch a snatch of ancient wisdom—“I eat too much steak.” Oh. But also: ha! Even the mother of the world has to watch his cholesterol intake these days.
The song title “Watch Me Get Married” is something of a bait-and-switch, too. It’s a song about communing intimately with nature, yes (“watching me get married to the immensity, the orchid in the canyon is the one for me”). But also, since we’ve last heard from him on 2013’s Dream River, Callahan did get married (in the literal sense, to a human, the documentary filmmaker Hanly Banks) and have a son. He eventually lets us know that too, in the simple, welcoming tone of that introductory song. “I got married to my wife, she’s lovely,” he sings on the placid “Son of the Sea,” “and I had a son.” Like so much of the record, this is a song about the connection between the physical space of the house and the feeling of being home. “The panic room is now a nursery,” Callahan drawls, continuing his tour. It might be the quintessential Bill Callahan lyric, because it doesn’t have to choose between being funny and profound.
When the roving, seven-song Apocalypse came out a little less than a decade ago, it would have been difficult to imagine Callahan having much to say about the glories of staying in one place and loving the members of his small, traditional family unit; after all, this was the guy extolling the virtues of just “riding for the feeling,” no particular destination in mind. But people change in unexpected ways: Shepherd in a Sheepskin, his most domestic record, is also his longest in ages, spanning 20 tracks over more than an hour. Not every one of them feels essential, especially toward the middle of the album, but you get the sense that the whole point of Shepherd was for Callahan to kick his shoes off and stretch out, the way one does with abandon in the individual comfort of his own home.
“Tugboats and Tumbleweeds,” the second-to-last track, finds Callahan giving some advice to whoever’s listening, but specifically, his son. “Some time alone when you are young is good,” he sings, speaking from experience. “High time and drunk old time, sober time.” It’s an ode to everything in moderation, and to stumbling around, though not forever: “Take a tumbleweed year or two,” he suggests, though it feels like an evolution of his outlook to suggest that one shouldn’t stay tumbling forever. It’s a wise, friendly song; the whole thing reminds me of that plaintively aspirational list of Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s resolutions that seems to go viral every late December. It makes the business of living seem simple, good, and true, as Callahan’s best songs do. His own tumbleweed time seems to have ended. Lucky for us, though, Callahan’s just getting started focusing his all-seeing eye on the roots.