Bill Callahan - “Coyotes” from the 2022 album YTI⅃AƎЯ on Drag City.

Singer/songwriter Bill Callahan is shaking up reality — literally, with the backwards title of his latest LP, YTILAER, out now via his long-time label Drag City. 

“It felt like it was necessary to rouse people — rouse their love, their kindness, their anger, rouse anything in them. Get their senses working again,” he shared in a press release.

On today's Song of the Day, that reality takes us to his backyard, where the titular animal made its presence known. “We lived for awhile in a house in the hills,” he explained. “Coyote hills. The coyotes would start their song at dawn. Dawn and dusk were their main appearance times. Our dog would sleep outside sometimes in the morning and our boy was still bite-size. The coyotes would come take notes, edging closer each day. Mornings on the kingsize outdoor daybed. Like a righteous floating tide the coyotes would drift into our world. Predator and prey, blurred. Past and present, blurred. The young, the aged are to be snatched and devoured. Past lives edge in closer to try to speak to us. Current lives eye the past ones like sleeping dogs. And love spans all, that is why the feeling is so deep — deeper than one lifetime.”

Read the full story at KEXP.org