Bill Callahan - Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019)

Deserve a thread of it's own for obvious reasons

01 Shepherd’s Welcome
02 Black Dog on the Beach
03 Angela
04 The Ballad of the Hulk
05 Writing
06 Morning Is My Godmother
07 747
08 Watch Me Get Married
09 Young Icarus
10 Released
11 What Comes After Certainty
12 Confederate Jasmine
13 Call Me Anything
14 Son of the Sea
15 Camels
16 Circles
17 When We Let Go
18 Lonesome Valley
19 Tugboats and Tumbleweeds
20 The Beast

Twenty tracks! I entered a second period of fandom with the last two (conventional) albums and then... he went quiet. I'm a bit excited.

"The voice murmuring in our ear, with shaggy-dog and other kinds of stories, is an old friend so fine to hear from again. Bill’s gentle, spacey take on folk and roots music is like no other; scraps of imagery, melody and instrumentation tumble suddenly together in moments of true human encounter."

From the Drag City site. The album is about an hour long. Lots of short Songs.

Album is going to be all-acoustic according to the pitchfork interview.

His last all-acoustic album was "River ain't too much to love" - his best record imo.

does that mean he isn't working with the sick guitarist from the last few albums though?

What does “all-acoustic” really mean, just him and a guitar?

A River Ain’t Too Much to Love had more than that in the mix.

Side 1 (6 tracks) of the album is on Spotify btw

This is indeed going back to the "River aint to much to love" minimal style which is great.

New 5 songs are on spotify. Lovely.

Its Streaming on NPR!

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/729217470/first-listen-bill-callahan-shepherd-in-a-sheepskin-vest?t=1559826628775

Full album is on spotify too. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I like what I've heard so far.

only up to side 3 ("circles") shows up on spotify for me

Ahh, I didn't realize there would be more than 2 sides. Good news for me is that I can now add side 3 to my list.

After a few spins of sides 1+2, i came to the conclusion that sadly, it is kinda boring and monotonic.

as opposed to all of those edge-of-your-seat, thrill-a-minute Smog records released over the past quarter century

I doubt Nostromo was looking for that. Besides, I can remember being thrilled by The Well and Drover and Riding for the feeling. I've only listened to side one of this but had a dispiriting sense of him singing/saying exactly what I expected him to sing/say but I felt that on Dream River as well.

he says the rhyme that seems so right but it's right and it's boring too.

you can anticipate it on your first listen.

"as opposed to all of those edge-of-your-seat, thrill-a-minute Smog records released over the past quarter century",:

Never liked Smog except for the last 2 records, where he invented himself as "Bill Callahan", which i love.

I think the new record has too many songs/sketches and the melodies are weaker. As a matter of fact, it's hard to distinguish between them.

I will give it a few more spins though.

raaash decisionnns

I've resigned myself to the fact that I don't really like this album all that much. The only exceptional or even memorable parts are the lyrics, and a lyric sheet does not an album make. Really wanted to like it, but every time I listen, nothing really sticks. It's also too long.

Agree. Saw him a few weeks ago; his set was mostly the new lp. I was hoping that hearing them live would help, but nope.

i haven't listened to this very intently yet - just catching it here and there on shuffle as i work through a backlog of 2019 listening. but it seems like the songs are meant to have this offhand quality that is a departure from the fundamentally dramatic mode he's preferred over his career: no matter how laconic or spectral or whatever he might have affected to be here or there, he generally lets the rise and surprise in the words tell the tale, and his appeal as a singer is to use a voice with strong presence and plainspoken lyrics to enhance the sublimity of the ordinary, usually by deferring or hiding what will then seem like it's being revealed, in unexpected or overlooked places. it sounds like the new songs are compatible with that but only if you allow him a bit more of a zen or parabolic quality, without so much of the implicit drama.

Yeah, it's duff this album. Still, I think it's the only record he's put out I since 'Wild Love' that I haven't enjoyed (except 'Rain on Lens', maybe.)

Ah figured I was in the minority on this one because it got great reviews but yeah, I think it’s got some of his strongest lyrical work yet, but the songs just don’t stick for me.

i don't listen to as much smog/bc currently as i used to, so periods come and go (it's probably a side effect in part of not feeling as attracted to the last couple few actually), but rain on lens was always the one i had a pronounced disinterest in.

thinking back to what i remember of it, it strikes me as a record where he had the idea to record a number of things in a style, deliberately, or happened upon that idea and committed to experimenting with it, which would not be his usual way, which seems to have been more a matter of working himself into, or finding himself in, a mood or attitude and naturally writing songs to fit.

maybe the new one has more of the exceptional deliberateness to it. though what we've seen of the process in his interviews/press materials for it suggests he just got displaced by life changes and wasn't quite sure how to recover his former processes/methods, but did do what he felt like was the most natural replacement/transformation of them, at present.