Bill Callahan’s baritone hits you hard. It makes you forget about repetitious chords, monotone deliveries, or song times, things that critics mention when they discuss music they enjoy. Callahan’s voice attacks first by wrapping around his lyrics with a compelling combination of compassion, bitterness, certainty, humor and despair. Then it disarms in a way that you can try to be dismissive at first note, but ultimately defensive by song’s end.  How is this possible? Callahan doesn’t sing so much as sit next to you, and in that distinctly weary and all-too-human voice of his, he talks in a register you can’t ignore. He talks about breaking horses, truth serums, anniversaries, feeling like he’s duping the world, or birds that have very human proclivities.  To be fair to him and everyone on stage, Callahan is a musician, and he’s come a long way from his lo-fi hero days. There’s still simplicity to his sound, but there’s a sparse elegance now that keeps pace with his more heartbreaking sentiments—in a song like “Rococo Zephyr,” for instance.  The band members on fiddle and stand-up bass deserve a lot of credit for adding so much of the new texture. They were able to get the sound of his newest CD, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, to sound better than the recording and smooth out some of the rougher parts, like the cringe-worthy, minor key intro to “The Wind and the Dove.” This was an over two-hour show, alternately exhilarating and draining, but altogether satisfying. The concert ended with an encore performance of “Eid Ma Clack Shaw,” a hilarious, self-deflating account of the creative process that details how Callahan found all the answers in life and summed them up in the most brilliant line ever concocted, only to find out later he wrote the complete gibberish of the song title. It’s about as good a summation of Callahan you’ll get. No matter how bleak and down he gets, he always has a cathartic card up his sleeve to show there’s something to smile about if you have the right perspective, or a good night’s sleep.