Josh Rouse and Kurt Wagner
Chester (Slow River)
Josh Rouse and Kurt Wagner have each tried collaborative songwriting before and have been less than fond of the experience. “It happens in Nashville a lot,” Wagner admits. “But the cowriting thing always gave me the creeps.” Nevertheless, here’s Chester, a five-song EP attributed to the combo of “Josh Rouse + Kurt Wagner,” just released on the Rykodisc subsidiary Slow River. Are these men impostors?
To answer that question, go back to 1998, a remarkable year for two of Nashville’s brightest young talents. Kurt Wagner’s band Lambchop released its fourth full-length LP, What Another Man Spills, to international acclaim and exposure. Lambchop was also involved in another of the year’s most talked-about records—the sublime Vic Chesnutt song-cycle The Salesman and Bernadette, for which Wagner and his massive ensemble provided musical backing and inspiration.
Simultaneously, Josh Rouse stunned many with his debut effort, Dressed Up Like Nebraska. Before the record’s release, the onetime Nebraskan (who also spent some time in Clarksville) was working in a coffee shop and trying to scare up some local gigs. The lovely, melancholy Dressed Up Like Nebraska struck a chord, and Rouse garnered attention on a national level before anyone in Music City really knew who he was.
Soon, not only were Rouse and Wagner appearing together in articles about Nashville’s local music renaissance, they were playing the same gigs, running into each other at The Sutler, and meeting on the street in the neighborhood they share. Mutual admiration led to camaraderie, and one day the subject of doing something together came up. “I’ve got some music,” Rouse said. “Why don’t you write some lyrics?”
Whatever their professed reservations about cowriting, the prospect was intriguing. Wagner’s last sustained attempt at collaborative songwriting was with Chesnutt. It turned out to be “such a disaster,” he says. “We’d try to out-weird each other.” But the idea of just writing words and leaving the music to someone else seemed like a relief.
Both men had preconceived notions about the project going in. Rouse says, “I wanted to do like this ’70s easy-listening type stuff.” And Wagner thought he’d just empty his notebook of some phrases and ideas that hadn’t found their way into Lambchop songs. What developed instead was something more organic than either had expected.
“The first meeting,” Rouse explains, “we both got together with a tape recorder. I’d hum the melodies, and he’d take it home, write some words, print them out on his computer, and bring them over, saying ‘Try this here.’ ”
Wagner continues, “Initially, I was going to work with words I had lying around, but then it became easier to write what the songs suggested—trying to tailor it to what I think is the way Josh sings and phrases things. I’m sort of limited by how I sing. Josh has a great voice. I tried to think of funny things I could make him sing.”
Rouse was tickled by the results. “I thought, ‘How’m I going to sing this?’ ” he chuckles. “My words are really simple. It was fun to sing someone else’s stuff, but some things, I just couldn’t put any kind of phrasing on it. It’s kind of a weird thing. I had to edit some of the words. If something didn’t work, I’d just edit it out. He said that’s OK.”
In fact, the lyric sheet on the finished EP reads differently than what Rouse actually sings, a discrepancy that Wagner says was intentional. “I like when they don’t always say what the singer’s singing. It’s like a bonus. An insight. It’s like seeing the script for a movie.”
The EP is called Chester, which was originally supposed to be the name of the duo’s “band”—a side project that didn’t bear either man’s name on the record cover. Wagner confesses, “I really didn’t even want to play on the damn thing,” but he added what the liner notes call “vibes, ambient noises” simply because he was hanging around the studio. That Rouse’s “bosses” at Slow River insisted Chester be filed as “Josh Rouse + Kurt Wagner” is mildly irritating to Wagner, but acceptable.
“We just thought it would be fun,” he explains. “I didn’t intend on it having my name. It’s weird to me. But record labels being what they are...they’ve got to figure out an angle. I’m proud of what we did, and I didn’t want to get in the way of it. [But] I look at these songs as Josh’s music. I don’t think I could sing ’em.”
In truth, Chester does have more in common with Rouse’s work than with Lambchop’s, though the collaborative spirit is much in evidence. Wagner’s lyrics maintain their focus on vivid images of the mundane, spiced with memorable lines like “Behold the rock and roll its mossy ass.” And the minimalist, reverb-y twang of tracks like “Somehow You Could Always Tell” and “I Couldn’t Wait” suggests that Rouse was trying to write music to match Wagner as much as Wagner was writing words to match Rouse.
But by and large, Chester represents Rouse building on the good qualities of Dressed Up Like Nebraska—simple, rootsy arrangements that find beauty in the downbeat (the magnificent “Table Dance”) and can give even the most chipper melody a hint of the forlorn (“That’s What I Know,” “65”). Credit also goes to the rest of the band, including Lambchop’s Dennis Cronin, who supplies some moody trumpet playing, and the crisp percussion of former Zulus and Sugar drummer Malcolm Travis. (Rouse is amused by Travis’ presence—“I was listening to Sugar at 20, now I’m 27 and their drummer is in my band,” he says.)
Dressed Up Like Nebraska’s warm reception still floors Rouse, partly because he heard good response from his own idols—among them Tom Waits and Peter Buck—and partly because he never understood why critics labeled him “alt-country” when his influences are more British post-punk. “I like melodies coming from everywhere,” Rouse points out, saying, “That’s from Johnny Marr...The Cure.” But Rouse can’t escape his own voice, which, on Chester as on his debut, has a high lonesome rasp that links suburban ennui with the desperation of men who work the land.
Rouse himself says, “I respond to bands with good vocals,” which is why he’s always working on his voice. He’s just finished a new record, and when asked how his sound is developing, he first says, “There’s horns. It’s a little warmer-sounding. More up-tempo...well, mid-tempo.” Then he gets to the heart of it: “I’m singing better. When you play a lot, you get to know your voice better, where you can push the notes.”
Lambchop is also preparing to put out a new album that’s even more orchestrated than its already full-bodied oeuvre. Wagner says he’s “trying to get a gospel choir, throwing string arrangements on.” These are expensive propositions when you’re an indie band that pays for your own recordings. But then, Lambchop turns a profit, unlike Rouse, who gets advances from his label and is therefore in debt (despite the lucrative licensing of his songs to TV shows like Dawson’s Creek).
Wagner explains Lambchop’s recording philosophy by saying, “We’re reinvesting. We’re very thrifty. People feel sorry for us...they tend to give us a better deal.” He adds that since Lambchop tours little, it’s identified more strongly with its recordings, so the band likes to make those records as fine as possible. So long as “it seems to make it possible to make another one,” Wagner says, “I like the process.”
As for Rouse, he’s working his day job and waiting for the new album to come out so that he can tour again and then get started on the next batch of songs. He gripes, “The record industry is always a year behind the artist at least. On my first tour, by six months in, I was tired of beating these songs.”
So consider Chester a preview of what the year 2000 will look like for the pride of Nashville’s alternative rock scene—Lambchop and Josh Rouse. Or look at it as an interesting experiment for two musicians who are bemused by the industry (and sometimes the craft) that they toil in. Mostly, look at it as a warm-up for Rouse, who’s ready to get back into the music game so that he “can stop valeting cars for a while.”
