Bill Callahan - Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest

The Guardian 100

(Drag City)
Humour and subtly shattering insights into a new life as a parent add profundity to Callahan’s expansive album

Online, the “wife guy” gets a bad rap – he is “worthy of suspicion because he appears to be using his devotion to his wife for personal gain”, as the New York Times put it. So Bill Callahan’s latest may arouse suspicion – 20 songs from his perspective as a new husband and father. But despite brilliantly sly lines like, “I got the woman of my dreams / And an imitation Eames” (What Comes After Certainty), Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is neither uxorious nor queasy.

Pitchfork 85

A peerless storyteller gazes deep into domestic life and offers a long, sun-warmed double album that is a highlight of his career.

The Guardian 80

(Drag City)

Related: Bill Callahan: 'I can't die – life is too good, it can't end'

“The panic room is now a nursery,” sings veteran leftfield tunesmith Bill Callahan on Son of the Sea. It’s just one instance of pregnant understatement on a 20-track album that ends this extraordinary American songwriter’s six years away from the release schedules. Life happened: marriage, a baby son, the death of his mother and now, a purple patch of tunes that combine the allusive rigour of his finest work with a looser, chatty style. “It’s nice to be writing again,” he offers on Writing. The Ballad of the Hulk, a meditation on anger, playfully details how Callahan “shared a tailor” with the superhero.