Drover

The first track on Apocalypse was recorded at Sonic Ranch in September 2010. It starts with Callahan's voice alone, then acoustic guitar, bass and drums come in, with Matt Kinsey's electric guitar on top; Gordon Butler's fiddle arrives with the chorus, which turns from minor to major, and the song breaks off straight into Baby's Breath. Callahan told The Rumpus it was more about harnessing the mind than about cattle, with every part of the conscious and subconscious pictured as big beasts on legs. He tied the opening of the American West to the album's title, calling the wilderness that followed the break from colonialism an apocalypse, and said that as a small child he heard the bluegrass fiddle as a baby crying and singing.

PopMatters heard a dramatic opener in which he casts himself as a cattle hand, and Stereogum, ten years on, a rhythm that calls up galloping horses and clattering trains. NPR made it a Song of the Day in June 2011. In 2018 Netflix's Wild Wild Country took its title from the chorus; the song opens the sixth and final episode and returns as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is led off the Learjet. Co-director Chapman Way said it seemed to fit both Sheela and the guru. Aoife O'Donovan recorded it alone on every instrument, and it appeared on the deluxe The Apathy Sessions in 2023.

Live

It is the song he has played most, logged at almost two hundred shows on setlist.fm, and it has stayed in his sets from the 2011 tour to 2026. At the Troubadour in June 2011, with Kinsey and Morgan, it sped up into something close to noise rock. Official live versions are on Live at Third Man Records, taped in Nashville in 2017, on Resuscitate! and on What a Night!, each running past seven minutes. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.