Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

Label: Drag City

Like his labelmate Will Oldham, Bill Callahan has spent his long career honing, altering, adding to and subtracting from an identity that has acted as a conduit for a now staggering amount of exceptional music. Whereas Oldham eventually created a personality that is him but not all of him, the richly throated Callahan seems to have found the path toward his own truth by simply being himself. (Hell, the guy used to put Smog in parentheses on his album covers!) Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is Callahan’s second album using his government name (and maybe his 12th, or 15th, or more, overall), and it is this veteran songwriter at his most unfiltered: stark, honest, knowing and disarmingly beautiful. “Maybe this was all/Was all that meant to be,” he offers not unhopefully on “Rococo Zephyr.” God damn. There is not a misstep here, but if you have anything left in your heart, you will feel it flutter upon hearing that song, the rootsy pseudo-Arabianisms of “The Wind and the Dove” and “Too Many Birds.” (M.L. Thrope)