After a weekend of storms, the sun is out, shining lazily through the windshield of Bill Callahan’s Subaru Outback. He’s slowly steering through Austin, Texas, the city he’s called home for the past decade and a half. At 52, Callahan has long been revered as an archetype for strong, silent men—the kind who fixate on the inevitability of death, who express their lidded emotions via terse tales of rivers and highways, whose private lives seem allergic to our culture of oversharing. But on this April afternoon, he’s unburdened, if a little tired.
Looking like a cool English teacher on summer break in a T-shirt, jeans, and a black hemp baseball cap, he confesses his fondness for Twitter (“I love reading people’s sentences”), the American version of “The Office” (“I found it to be a very romantic show”), and Ariana Grande’s recent hits (“Very self-referential—she’s making a story of herself”). Occasionally, he rambles. At one point, the same guy who used to be so guarded that he’d only conduct interviews via fax unravels an Inception-style story-within-a-story that’s essentially about his 4-year-old son, Bass, not wanting to go to school. “I don’t want this interview to be all about my kid,” he adds with a laugh. Then he pauses. “Well, that’s up to me, I guess.”
For all his disarming candidness, though, Bill Callahan the songwriter—patient, wise, observant, stoney—is not so different than Bill Callahan the hemp-hatted dad. In conversation, as with his records, cavernous pauses between thoughts are common, a sign of deeper focus, an excuse to lean in closer. And just like the wry jokes in his songs, his casual remarks can suddenly turn idiomatic. “It’s one of mankind’s greatest achievements, the car,” he says in the driver’s seat. “Every time I turn on the car, it’s exciting to me—potential.” Then he’s quiet, eyes on the road.
As we make our way through Austin, Callahan keeps a running joke about the various places where we could stop to discuss Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, his luminous new record. He points out a construction site that used to be a Hooters, a golf course, a sauna. The sweat box seems like a good idea until he considers how it might feel to shed light on his creative process in a room where everyone else is trying to relax. “I’d feel like a douche,” he deadpans. He settles on a coffee shop.
Across a recording career that’s spanned more than three decades, Callahan has become known for his insular self-sufficiency. Since abandoning his Smog moniker in 2007 to record under his birth name, his music has grown more sparse and stoic, a series of country landscapes with a bold, well-traveled narrator just outside the frame. As his voice has grown deeper and stronger, his lyrics have aged gracefully along with it. At their best, his records suggest an ongoing investigation into why we’re here, and what we’re supposed to know before we leave. On his last album, 2013’s languid Dream River, he presented a series of existential quandaries with zenlike resolve, as if he had been chosen to consult a higher power and bring back answers for the rest of us. “Is life a ride to ride?” he sang. “Or a story to shape and confide?/Or chaos neatly denied?”
It’s been nearly six years since he raised those questions, a veritable eternity in his prolific career. Since his earliest self-released tapes in the late ’80s—noisy, fragmented works of outsider art that bear no resemblance to his recent material—Callahan has maintained a ceaseless pace, never taking more than two years between records. This devotion has served as a guiding light through his body of work, which ranks among the wisest and most consistent among his generation of American songwriters.
“Music was all I had to do to feel like I was being a worthwhile human,” he says, looking back. “Then some things came along and made music not number one anymore… or, at least, put it in a three-way-tie for number one.”
In 2014, Callahan married Hanly Banks, a documentarian and therapist who directed his 2012 tour film Apocalypse. Bass arrived the following year. The family moved briefly to Santa Barbara, California, but Callahan found himself overwhelmed by the new surroundings and unable to focus. “When a cat walks into a room, it has to look all around and make sure it’s safe before it can curl up and go to sleep,” he explains. “I’m the same way.”
They moved back to Austin, and Callahan’s songs started flowing again. Where his last few albums unfurled painstakingly, like serene novellas, Shepherd is more like a scrapbook, filled with memories, sketches, jokes. The songs are shorter, and the guy singing them seems somehow closer—a byproduct of the album’s all-acoustic setting, and Callahan’s newly direct approach to writing. It’s what he calls a “real-life record.”
Callahan tells me he’s trying to be “more of an open book” in general, and many of these songs seem jarringly domestic coming from one of modern folk music’s most elusive wanderers. Throughout Shepherd, he uses the lowest, oakiest reaches of his baritone to acknowledge the renovators working on his home, or to briefly summarize a scene from “Sesame Street,” or to say things like, “I got married/To my wife/She’s lovely.”
As Callahan and I wander through a public park where he often takes his son to play, he speaks frankly about his romantic conversion. “Love is the answer to pretty much everything,” he says after deliberation, as if he’s genuinely considering the myriad questions it could solve. “If we can just love each other’s complete and utter humanness, that’s what everything boils down to, really.”
Callahan still speaks with veritable hearts in his eyes about his honeymoon in Kauai, Hawaii, which he calls the “best place on Earth,” and he rhapsodizes about his imagined responsibility to “bang the drum for marriage.” He even tries to cajole me into popping the question to my girlfriend in New York right then and there. “Come to Jesus,” he drawls. “I’m gonna get you to propose—on the phone!”
Passing a small garden, he stops to admire a bunch of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush flowers. “Usually they come once a season, but it’s been so hot and cold here that they keep coming back,” he says. “It’s a new spring every couple weeks, and they bloom again.” We stop by a pond where three turtles are lined up statuesque on a log, and Callahan talks about wanting to spend more time around the house, tending his own garden. “I’d like to have a backyard full of watermelons,” he says.
Domestic life was something Callahan didn’t anticipate, something that occurred with the intensity of hard rain. “I had never really believed in ‘the one,’ I just thought you find someone that seems pretty good and you try to make it work,” he says. “But now I believe in that. It’s not a cakewalk, but it just feels like it’s supposed to be, and you’ll do anything to keep it going, because you need it.”
Callahan has sung about love before, and some of his past relationships—with fellow indie artists like Joanna Newsom, Chan Marshall, and Cynthia Dall—have been among the few (relatively) public aspects of his personal life out there. His writing on the subject has ranged from bleak to darkly humorous, up through his more open-ended and mystical observations. “Well, I could tell you about the river,” he sang to a partner on 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, “or we could just get in.”
The love songs on Shepherd delight in a different kind of intimacy. I point out how surprising the setting of the new record is at first, hearing him tell stories confined to small spaces, with the wilderness far in the distance. He nods. “There’s a lot about ‘the house’ on the record. Kids need a house. They love routine.”
After his son was born, Callahan was unsure where fatherhood fit into his life as a musician. He considered abandoning his career to be a full-time dad. “It’s a worthwhile thing you can do with your life, no shame in that,” he says. “But then I realized that the old me that made music had to stay alive, or else I would die.”
Having a child meant there would be less music in the house—with a guitar in his hands, the focus was away from his son, and that wouldn’t fly. Same goes for meditating, a strict practice he had to fit into pared down pockets of his day, like when he would sit on a yoga ball and bounce his son to sleep. “It was a big shakeup,” he says of his new roles as father and husband. To illustrate the balance, he holds his hands out and asks, “How do I hold all these things?”
Nowadays it’s a little easier to manage. He tells me that Bass can sing along to the beginning of Shepherd’s “The Ballad of the Hulk,” a hushed and ambling song that uses actor Bill Bixby’s 1978 portrayal of the comic book character as an archetype for all kinds of inwardly destructive men, somewhere mid-transformation. Callahan also mentions how his son occasionally wanders over to his dad’s work shed to play some drums or harmonica. When I ask if he ever considered including Bass’ musical handiwork on the album, Callahan responds firmly: “No one wants to hear that.”
A lyric from the new record, in a song called “Son of the Sea,” reads, “The house is full of life; life is change.” “I don’t know very many records that are about being happily married and having a kid,” Callahan tells me, citing Carly Simon as a source of inspiration for Shepherd. “I just wanted to prove that your life doesn’t end if you settle down.”
In the last few months, Callahan has started keeping a dream journal, and 80 percent of the entries take place in airplanes or airports. “On an airplane, you get a cross section of humanity,” he says. Another long pause. “In sweatpants.” Both his last album and this new one include songs about air travel, but where Dream River’s “Small Plane” dealt with two people learning to take off with each other, Shepherd’s “747” extends far beyond, envisioning heaven as a place from which our souls are delivered at birth. The song itself seems to follow this journey. “We turned darkness into morning,” he repeats. “And we turned belief into evening.” When I mention that it’s hard to imagine him writing such a joyous reverie at any other point in his career, he reminds me that it’s all part of the same story: “But the song is also about death.”
As his new album was taking shape over the last few years, Callahan continued performing live, drawing on material from throughout his catalog. It marked the first time he played live without new music to showcase so, to keep himself interested, he began adding covers to the set. One of them was a standard he learned from the foundational folk group the Carter Family called “Lonesome Valley.” Its lyrics are simple, revolving around a refrain—“Everybody’s gotta walk the lonesome valley”—and listing individual family members as examples. The song appears near the end of Shepherd and includes gently reassuring backing vocals from his wife. Explaining his decision to include the cover, he says, “Because that song deals with family and family dying, it just seemed like... good roots.”
The hardest laugh I hear from Callahan all day comes when I ask if he was close with his father, who, along with his mother, worked for the National Security Agency. “Um, no,” he eventually replies. “A few years ago he told me, ‘I didn’t really care about any of you kids. I was just focused on myself and my career.’ It was a hard thing to hear so directly. At least he was being honest.”
As a new dad, Callahan has been thinking of his own childhood, and what he wants to do differently. “Probably because I had a kid so late in my life, my parenting skills are not reactionary—I’m not really trying to prove anything to my dad.” He laughs. “I make my decisions more just from common sense.” His philosophy is contained in “Tugboats and Tumbleweeds,” the new album’s penultimate song, which offers advice from father to son. Among the wisdom: Solitude can be illuminating, as can wandering, just as long as you don’t mislead someone you love. To prove his point, the song ends with his pledge of commitment: “You’re my tugboat,” he sings sweetly.
While Shepherd is largely an ode to stability, it’s also a study in impermanence. In May 2018, Callahan’s mother died of cancer. She and his father had moved from Wisconsin to Austin after Bass’ birth. “I knew it would be very difficult to oversee their old age from so far away,” he says. “So I was like, ‘Why don’t you just come here... and die.’” He laughs at the bluntness. “I didn’t say the ‘die’ part. But that’s what happened.”
Callahan stayed by his mother’s side through her decline. “I had never really sat with someone in their last few months, weeks, days, seeing the life slipping away from them,” he says. “But it makes sense when you see it. It’s like, ‘OK. This is beautiful and it’s supposed to be happening.’ It’s also awful.”
On “Circles,” one of Shepherd’s purest and most peaceful songs, Callahan sings, “I made a circle, I guess/When I folded her hands across her chest.” The album also contains more oblique references to the consequences of death—the hollow feeling it leaves, the gaps in knowledge that haunt us. On a song called “Angela,” he intones, “Like motel curtains, we never really met.”
Surrounded by young families enjoying the weather around Lake Austin, Callahan reflects on his relationship with his mother. “I never understood her,” he admits. “And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me.” He rubs his eyes and his spirit seems to lighten, as if suddenly struck with a pleasant memory. “We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?” Then, a long silence he doesn’t need to fill.
