And perhaps that is what has allowed his work to endure for so long, the small gift that is Callahan’s cruel vulnerability about how far behind he can be, or how unsure he is of what future awaits him. Since his days performing under the Smog stage name, Callahan has long been at odds with his own mortality, trying to make sense of a world that’s rambling forward with or without him. Its predecessor, Shepherd in Sheepskin Vest, was a perfect folk record about becoming a new husband and a new father that also welcomed meditations on the violence of masculinity, the slouching detriments of isolation and how the goodness of the women we love can sometimes right the ship of us misguided men. Though the rollout of Gold Record was unusual and expedited, the record itself was a testimony to empathy featuring some of Callahan’s warmest, boldest songs to date-a character study and Western serial of oddballs born in dreams. ![]() “I think, once you get habits like that, it can be hard to break them.” “It got ingrained in me from the start, at least when I started working in studios, to be as fast as you can, record it and make it as quick as you can, so that you spend the least amount of money,” he says. ![]() It was a simple, singular record written, performed and mixed in a week, an exercise in a practice Callahan had learned early on in his tenure with longtime label Drag City. Before it hit shelves nearly a full year later, Callahan elected to release nine of the record’s 10 tracks as singles, many of which play into the same acoustic alchemy and rarely make any daring turns-but that was the point. ![]() Three days after releasing his critically acclaimed, mammoth double album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest in the summer of 2019, apocalyptic folk singer and gothic Western purveyor Bill Callahan decamped to Estuary Studios in his hometown of Austin, Texas, to make what would become his seventh solo album, Gold Record.
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