Drover

Bill Callahan’s baritone is one of the few voices in contemporary music that sounds genuinely old — not old-fashioned, not retro, but old in the way that an oak tree is old: something that has been shaped by a great deal of time and carries the evidence of it. By Apocalypse in 2011, he had been recording under various names for two decades, and “Drover” contains everything those decades produced: the patience, the surreal imagery, the deceptively simple arrangements that accumulate enormous weight.

A drover is a cattle driver — someone who moves livestock across landscapes. Callahan uses the image to meditate on the relationship between leading and being led, between the person who drives the herd and the herd that is driven, between the shepherd figure and the flock. The cattle imagery is concrete and specific and wholly unlike the soft pastoral metaphors of contemporary folk — this is working livestock, the American West as it actually operates, muscle and dust and the particular loneliness of driving animals across distance.

The opening line — “The real people went away” — establishes the song’s tone immediately: whatever this landscape contained before, it contains less of it now. The rolling drum beat that enters and sustains throughout gives the song its forward motion, the sense of something being driven across distance.

“I am a drover / My only game / Is to see how far I can drive / Before the cattle go lame.”

Apocalypse was later used in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, introducing Callahan to listeners who had never encountered him. “Drover” is why those listeners stayed. But this song belongs to the people who found it first, and they know why.