Apocalypse

Callahan wrote it from nothing in about two and a half months of steady work in his shed, and called it an experiment in starting from zero and making something he liked. He recorded it at Sonic Ranch, a residential studio near the Mexican border, with John Congleton engineering, Matt Kinsey on electric guitar, Neal Morgan on drums, Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater on keyboards, Gordon Butler on fiddle and Luke Franco on flute. He wanted a one-word title, he said, so he chose the biggest, the last word. He described it as an inward record, as much about American music as about America, and later said he did not know how these records would have sounded without Kinsey. The cover is Paul Ryan's painting of Mule Ears Peak in Big Bend National Park.

It reached six on Billboard's Folk Albums chart. Pitchfork gave it 8.0 and AllMusic four stars; Mojo and Pitchfork both placed it 23rd among the albums of 2011, and Pitchfork later put it 39th of the decade. Stereogum's tenth-anniversary piece described the usual reading of it as his treatise on the United States.