Bill Callahan works from a distance. Through three decades of writing songs that marry folk’s pastoral candor with indie rock’s taste for obscurity, he’s stood just close enough to shed light on the human condition, but removed enough to cordon off much of his own interiority. Next to his unaffected vocals, arm’s-length poetics have long been a calling card, distilling his deeper meaning into fragmented glances.

But time has a way of breaking down old habits. My Days of 58 is Callahan’s most personal record yet. With his ninth album under his own name, and 20th including the Smog catalog, the venerable singer-songwriter maintains his trajectory of contemplating more far-reaching, fundamental questions, but now plants them in his own experience. Insights on his family, home and chosen vocation pile up from diaristic notes on life as it happens. He sees himself in the world, and the world in himself, and never gives the impression that he’s speaking from any perspective but his own.

Throughout these observational meditations, Callahan picks up on his narrative and reaches through it. On “Empathy,” after voicing the realization that he’s just like his father, he steps forward to intone: “I added these lines last/ I don’t know if they’re true.” Elsewhere, he’ll cushion the impact of his introspective revelations; when he confesses, “I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar/ Instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion/ Which is the exact opposite reason of why I got into this in the first place,” he pokes a hole in the moment by crowning himself the “Pathol O.G.”

If his delivery seems dry, spend some time with it, and you’ll hear a closeness waiting to reveal itself. In pauses, exhales and steps up an octave, he’s awestruck, uncertain and devoted.