Just last week, Drag City legends Bill Callahan and Bonnie "Prince" Billy teamed up to cover Cat Stevens with an assist from AZITA. Bill and Billy are back today with another cover, this time a version of "OD'd In Denver" by legacy country star and disgraced Monday Night Football theme song guy Hank Williams Jr.

In 1967, when he was still known as Cat Stevens, the folk singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam released his sophomore LP New Masters. On that LP, which he reissued earlier this year, Islam included a truly bleak and desolate protest song called "Blackness Of The Night": "For this bad, bad world I'm beginning to doubt/ I'm alone…

Last week I enthused about Gold Record, another staggering Bill Callahan album in a career full of them. I would very much like to go see Callahan perform those songs on tour, but seeing as we're still stuck in shitty pandemic limbo, we'll all have to settle for online videos.

The quick follow-up LP is always a sketchy proposition. It happens all the time: An artist puts a lot of effort into a statement album, piling up more songs than they can use. Upon completion, their creative juices are flowing, so they decide to keep going. A second batch of songs arrives quickly, assembled from…

Next week, the much-loved indie lifer Bill Callahan will release his new album Gold Record. In the lead-up to the album's release, Callahan has been doing something interesting. He's released one song every Monday, thus ensuring that we will have heard the entire LP by the time it comes out. Today, we get a new…