As you listen to Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest, a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does - you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! What more do you need to complete you? Or perhaps, after all the time, the obvious needs to be made just a little more explicit? The sense of a life thunderstruck by change infuses Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest - the songs wander from expressions of newfound joy and great contentment to other snapshots, considerations of the not-joy that we all know. Unsettling dream-images and mythic recollections are patiently received; the undertow of the past is resisted, pulling against it instead into the present, accepting revolutions of time and the unconscious as a natural flow.