Dissolved and Loosed
Lambchop's Kurt Wagner on art school, playing solo and the album cover for Ohio
by Rob Trucks
"I really don't try to be a troublemaker," says Lambchop steward Kurt Wagner. But the press release for the Nashville band's latest, OH (Ohio) contains this quote: "Lambchop more and more has become a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist. I've fought against that interpretation for 20 years, but now I've just given up trying to fight it anymore."
"Well, I mean, I really kind of, you know, basically said that," Wagner says with laugh. He's sitting within the confines of one of the few parts of New York City's Washington Square not currently under construction. Even the park's signature arch is surrounded by chain-link fencing. And onstage at local club Living Room the previous night, possibly fenced in himself, Wagner's story was a little different.
"I'm Kurt," he said to the crowd. "I play in a band called Lambchop. I am not starting a solo career."
Cue Wagner's honest and hearty guffaw.
To count the apparent and potentially problematic contradictions within Lambchop's 20-year career would require something akin to a higher math. The band's long-standing tag as "Nashville's most fucked-up country band" hasn't rung true in, maybe, ever. (Fucked-up? Maybe. Country? Not hardly). The group is nearly as anonymous stateside as they are acclaimed overseas. And at least through Christmas, the band, whose membership once swelled past 20, will be represented by a singular frontman in a signature feed store cap.
"The reason I started doing solo stuff was I was trying to find another way to writing songs," Wagner says. "And the idea of going out, writing some songs, and playing them in front of people and watching them develop is something I'd never tried before, because I tried to shy away from being a solo performer. So my concept for this new record was really to do that."
Not unlike the legion of Lambchop albums before it, Ohio (OH) often offers serene, soothing music with surprisingly unsettling lyrics, unique conceptions of an examined, yet otherwise commonplace, life.
You know, the kind of music that's never really been popular in, say, Middle America.
"What I gleaned from art school was sort of how you can incorporate your life and your art," Wagner says by way of explanation. "They become the same thing. It's really just about being part of your experience, part of your daily life, and it came out of that. And so obviously that sort of idea sort of drifted into how I started to write songs."
Ohio's cover, as well as a partnered painting inside the gatefold, exhibits the work of Michael Peed, one of Wagner's former art school instructors. Each shows a foreground couple, nude and reclining in a seemingly sedate living room, while outside their prosaic picture window the shitstorm known as life goes on around them.
"There's a blankness to it, that if you get past that a little bit, there's a lot more going on than just its blatant power of nudity," Wagner says. "There's something touching. There's something funny. There's something disturbing. And they kind of work together in some sort of duality. Just by virtue of having two things placed together there's going to be relationships that happen. And that's something very basic in what I do.
"His work stems out of this sort of daily process of recording thoughts and ideas and information and them becoming recurring themes," Wagner says of his former teacher Peed. "You know, a brilliant sort of approach, but in a way very humble and just sort of a natural, no-big-deal kind of a thing. And I appreciated that because I never considered myself particularly gifted when it comes to either visual art or music.
"I just think life's, you know, complicated, and it's kind of funny in a way," he says. "And that's reflected in the sort of work I end up doing. It ends up being kind of complicated, and kind of funny."
Improbably enough, above the din of proximate playgrounds and park-bound jackhammers, Kurt Wagner's risible roar resounds.
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