Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Early buzz was that Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle was Bill Callahan's Blood on the Tracks, a suite of heartbroken songs about the end of his relationship with alt-folkie sprite Joanna Newsom. Thing is, given Callahan's mordant sensibility even at the best of times, how exactly is one supposed to tell when he's in a particularly black mood? In fact, these nine songs are closer in sound and spirit to Leonard Cohen's wry romanticism than the Jackson Browne type of heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter. Gently self-mocking lines like "I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again" deflate any portrait of the artist as a heartbroken wretch. So does the simply gorgeous "Eid Ma Clack Shaw," in which Callahan announces that the world's most beautiful song came to him in a dream, at which point he starts singing nonsense syllables in his beautifully deadpan baritone. Throughout, co-producer John Congleton wraps Callahan's songs in elegant layers of strings and horns, most beautifully on the haunting extended closer "Faith/Void." Bill Callahan has quietly grown into one of his generation's finest singer-songwriters, and Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle ranks with his best.