In the vines
Californian winery makes suitably bucolic setting for revealing a new album.
Bill Callahan
Gundlach Bundschu Winery, California
AN OLD REDWOOD barn in an older winery in Sonoma, the back opening out onto an idyllic view: trees, donkeys, acres of grapevines, and the sun taking its own sweet time to go down. “It’s like a postcard behind you”, says Bill Callahan a few songs into the show, and everyone turns around to look with him. Everyone being maybe 275 people, either sitting on folding chairs or standing at the back. Along with the haystacks abutting the stage, they give the impression of a well-attended barn dance. Last night he played to a sold-out crowd of 1,300 in San Francisco two hours away. But it’s hard to imagine a more perfect spot for his Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest tour than this old barn.
The evening starts, like his new album, with Shepherd’s Welcome. Short, half-spoken, like a conversation, it’s given an intensity and sense of mystery by his band – a three-piece that sounds
like a six-piece, they’re that good: electric guitar, drums/percussion, upright bass. Callahan, dressed Dad-casual in buttonedup black shirt, jeans and Glen Campbellesque haircut, strums an acoustic guitar centre-stage, barely moving, face glued to the microphone. Typical Callahan then? Actually, not. When, after the second song, a baby in the audience loudly cries out “Gaaa!”, Callahan answers with an equally loud “Gaaa!” and asks how many babies there are in the audience. “Five? Too many. There’s a three-baby limit,” he quips, before singing Angela, its tender beauty accented by the bar’s clapboard-church acoustics and the interplay of percussion and electric guitar. Unusually chatty, he even tells us he has an uncle and some cousins here tonight.
Eleven of the 17 songs are from Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, all are warmly received, although the loudest roar comes half way through for America!, a pulsing, edgy, barndance-disco-blues that name-checks country music heroes, like Johnny Cash and
Kris Kristofferson, who served in the armed forces. “I never served my country,” he sings. It’s one of three songs he does from Apocalypse. Perhaps because, like the new album, it’s a kind of song circle in which he plays the wise observer – even if on ShepherdÉ it’s himself he’s observing and his new life as a husband and a family man.
A bat flits around the barn at twilight. There’s a dreamy hypnotic feel to the new songs, with bowed bass drones, percussion and guitar effects. Two of the best of the old songs are Drover and Let’s Move To The Country, one eight years old, one 20, and both about the country, in either a hopeful or broken way. Although nature’s appeared in many Callahan songs – horses, eagles, cattle, rivers, pine trees and the rest – never has it taken such a benign and mellow guise. “I used to be darker,” Callahan sings in Jim Cain. Judging by tonight, he’s lighter now.
“A baby loudly cries, ‘Gaaa!’. Callahan answers with an equally loud, ‘Gaaa!’.”