Description
Amusingly…this just might be the ‘Gold’ Record we always knew Bill Callahan had in him! Last summer, he returned from a silence of years – now, he’s raring to go with another new one already. The abiding humanity of latter-day Callahan is highlighted by dark plumes of caustic wit upending standards of our everyday life and the songs that celebrate it: the job, the wife, the TV, the neighbors. Bill slips easily into his characters, whether they’re easy people or not – and the cross-hatch of their light and shadow is unpredictably entertaining in the manner that belongs to only one singer…his stories all performed in that spoken/sung deeply affecting baritone voice….and ironically on the opening track he name-checks the “king” of that vocal delivery/style ….MR COHEN himself!
Released barely a year after the enormous, six-years-in-the-making ‘Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest’, an album that meditated on birth, life and death, Bill Callahan’s seventh outing (under his own name) ‘Gold Record’ finds him ploughing firmly against the grain. As the wider world collapses all around him, the prolific singer-songwriter has released the warmest, wittiest and most comforting work of his career.
