BILL CALLAHAN - YTI⅃AƎЯ VINYL (2LP GATEFOLD)

 Release Date: 24th February 2023

"“And we’re coming out of dreams / And we’re coming back to dreams,” is the first thing you hear Bill say as you remake your acquaintance on ‘YTI⅃AƎЯ’. Right out the gate, he’s standing in two places at once: meeting up with old friends behind the scenes and encountering them on the record, finding himself coming round the bend and then again as someone else on down the line. Like the character actor he played on ‘Gold Record’, writing stories about other people, telling jokes about everyone, and in singing them, becoming the songs. “You do what you’ve got to do / To see the picture,” Bill’s got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song too, and some other singers come in too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow, in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. And you might - but you might not, too. In this company, Bill continues his journey, tunnelling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. With Bill’s voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and / or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go. There’s nothing they can’t do."