Courting the Muse
Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner on songwriting, linguistics and why 2005 sucked
by Noel Murray
Since the creative breakthrough of 2000’s Nixon, Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner has been artistically restless, looking for new modes of expression and trying to avoid repeating himself. In some ways, the band’s new album, Damaged, is the record Wagner’s been building to ever since. Damaged is the 15-piece Nashville band’s best work to date, suffused with the lushness of Nixon, the pensiveness of Is a Woman, and the loose, organic performing style of 2004’s twin releases Aw C’mon and No, You C’mon.
One of the oft-heard knocks against Lambchop is that Wagner’s laconic, conversational vocal style and preference for lullaby-like instrumentation make a lot of the band’s songs sound the same. Wagner admits that he’s trying to shake up his presentation a little. “I’m not intentionally trying to not sound good,” he says. “I was just trying to find another way of writing. A sound I hadn’t heard, but that I liked. I’m always trying to find other ways to make a song more interesting—structures, ideas.”
Take any Damaged song at random, and the listener hears elegantly sloping compositions that fuse all the genres that Lambchop has previously adopted into a seamless whole. “The Rise and Fall of the Letter P” sounds like classic country, R&B, indie-rock, avant-garde and ’70s AM, all at once. Wagner says that, unlike the song-a-day project he embarked on a couple of years ago, the songs for Damaged were worked out carefully over extended periods of time, sometimes four to six months.
Even the lyrics were up for refurbishment. As Wagner puts it, “I spent a lot of time getting interested in this weird, arcane language that was happening in the United States around the time of the Civil War. It was like a combination of what would become the American way of speaking and what was left over from the British—the Shakespearean—like the writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe. I was very interested in her phrasing and the structure of her sentences. It wasn’t quite so easy to understand; yet I found it very beautiful. Poetic. Even that affected the way I was going about things.”
Most of these new approaches to songwriting have been largely internalized. Damaged does sound like a Lambchop album, right down to the rapidly plucked, shimmering guitar that runs through the album-opener, “Paperback Bible.” But the band fiddles with some disjointed structures, like on the album closer, “The Decline of Country and Western Civilization,” which shifts from gnarled shouting and pounding to something more lightly lyrical. The song recalls Pete Townshend’s experiments with converting his complex feelings of rage and shame into Who-ready arena rock.
The gospel-tinged Southern R&B of “I Would Have Waited Here All Day” is a striking sketch of a woman somewhat miserably imagining what her man is up to while she putters around the house. It was written for Candi Staton, for the Mark Nevers-produced album His Hands. But it wasn’t recorded by Staton, and may not even have been heard by her. According to Wagner, “Mark was kind of afraid that she wouldn’t want to say the word ‘dick.’ But it really was based on anecdotes and things about Candi I’d asked about. How she feels about men, how she’s been treated. Mark didn’t know her that well at the time, and didn’t want to freak her out with some weirdo song. Now he thinks she’d love it.”
That bruised quality in “I Would Have Waited Here All Day” pervades a lot of the record. Given Wagner’s general geniality—defined by his telltale cackling laugh—what’s most striking about Damaged is how suffused with sadness it is. There’s always been a balance of joy and melancholy to Lambchop’s music, but here the mood leans hard to the latter.
On “Prepared [2],” a noir-ish piano opening gives way to a bittersweet study of lives knocked off balance by tragedies both common and unimaginable. The song is punctuated by swells of strings that have the quality of uncontrollable weeping. Anyone who’s been following Wagner’s career over the last decade might be tempted to call him up after listening to it for the first time, just to see if he’s okay.
Wagner laughs when he’s told this, and insists, “Everything’s fine now.” But his attempts at writing in different ways included looking inward rather than being a dispassionate observer. And, frankly, for Wagner, 2005 was rocky. “It’s been kind of a tough year for lots of people,” he says. “It was kind of relentless, this overwhelming sense of a lot of bad crap happening. I just didn’t see a lot of hope. I didn’t really realize what was going on at the time. I was just collecting songs, and the theme kind of arose when I saw how a lot of these songs fit together. They had this ‘damaged’ theme in common. At the time I didn’t really think of it as being therapeutic, writing these songs. It was just what was happening in my life.”
Much of the record plays like a conversation between people who’ve been hurt. The protagonist of “The Rise and Fall of the Letter P” shows defiance in the face of a disagreement, while “A Day Without Glasses” could be a response from the person on the other end of the argument. In “Beers Before the Barbican,” two old friends go out for a drink and commiserate. And all of this is peppered with lite-funk guitar and ebullient instrumental breaks that alleviate some of the hurt.
“I think there’s elements of hope on this record,” Wagner says. “I certainly think it ends on an upbeat note.” It begins on one too. “Paperback Bible,” commissioned for an All Things Considered piece about call-in radio swap meets, reduces what people want and what they let go to meaningful nuggets: a rocking chair, a puppy, a broken TV that can be stripped for parts. And later on the record, “Crackers” speaks to people who get through the day by enjoying the little things, like a personal email or “a righteous piece of cheese.”
The album’s penultimate song, “Short,” layers distant guitar distortion—evoking the memory of a recent storm—into an arrangement that’s otherwise simple and stark, with shades of Leonard Cohen’s low, dark folksongs. But it’s arguably Damaged’s most hopeful moment, as the song’s main character faces the end and grumbles, “It’s not finished yet.” That’s a strong sentiment, summing up a remarkably strong record.
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