If Bill Callahan sounds different on Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, it’s because he is different. The famously stoic singer-songwriter—once a specter floating through lo-fi darkness under the name Smog—is now a husband, a father, and maybe, just maybe, someone who believes in joy.
“It wasn’t really a desire or concern of mine,” he admits. “But then I met my wife-to-be and I desired things I never desired.” Which is about as close as Callahan gets to a rom-com confession.
Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is a sprawling double album, 20 songs that stretch from the nursery to the desert to the grave, anchored in the minutiae of married life and dreams that might not be nonsense after all. “Writing songs hasn’t changed for me,” he says. “But I had to learn to converse with the muse in a new language. I was a different person.”
This is not, however, some soft-focus dad-rock glow-up. Callahan, ever the craftsman of brutal grace, doesn’t flinch from awkward truths. “Did your wife mind the laying out the towel bit?” I ask about a lyric that might be the only poetic depiction of period sex in the modern American songbook.
“You’re actually the first person to ask me that,” he laughs. “But I cleared it with her. She was fine with it.”
That line—like the record itself—isn’t meant to be shocking. It’s just honest. “I wanted to cover everything from the most basic human needs to the loftiest human desires. Earthly and cosmic. Birth and death.”
Callahan’s new world, built on the unpredictable terrain of fatherhood, shifted not just how he writes, but what he hears. “He fixates on superheroes,” he says of his son, referencing a lyric that name-drops the Hulk. “I tried to play "Tugboats and Tumbleweeds" for him. He just left the room.”
Some songs, like “Writing,” ask out loud where all the good songs have gone. The answer might be: into dreams. Callahan’s always mined them, whether his or, now, his wife’s. “Camels,” one of the record’s more surreal entries, came from a dream she had about camels collapsing in the desert. “Dreams should be listened to,” he says. “They mean more than anything a mortal could come up with.”
He’s not wrong. The album opens with a black dog chasing a white seagull—an image that crystallized the entire song for him. And yes, he knows the symbolism: the black dog is death. And death is never far in Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, even as it’s sung next to lullabies and domestic hymns.
“I wanted to look at where I was, inside and out, close up and far away,” he says. “That’s one reason there are so many songs—so many voices piping up.”
And those voices don’t go away. Even after they’re recorded, Callahan sees his songs as restless travelers. “They start embryonic,” he says, “and then they kind of grow up once you play them live. They all hang out together in sets, they influence each other. They relax into themselves.”
One of the earliest of those voices—“Cold Blooded Old Times,” featured on the High Fidelity soundtrack—is where many fans first heard him. “I could barely hear it in the movie,” he admits. “But a lot of people told me that’s where they discovered me. I guess it was pre-Internet. You never really knew where people were getting on board.”
Now he’s inviting us into something deeper, more vulnerable. It’s still sparse and deliberate, but it’s never more personal than when he’s singing about the messiness of life—literally.
And as for his son, he’s already changing what Callahan listens to, if not how he writes. “He just wants different things,” Bill says. “He knows what he wants.”
So does Callahan. And for now, it sounds like a shepherd in a sheepskin vest, dreaming of camels, making peace with mortality, and laying down towels like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
