To name an album Showtunes is to establish a certain set of expectations. The show tunes genre has a long, rich lineage, one that includes some of music history’s finest songwriters. The storied Great American Songbook is built on show tunes, many of which have become cultural touchstones.
For Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, an experiment and a coincidence led to the band’s latest album, which is called (you guessed it) Showtunes. Wagner and his collaborators built the eight-track album atop a foundation of piano and voice. In addition to being reminiscent of songwriter-composers like Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, it’s yet another new sound for the long-running collective that’s been exploring and expanding on alt-country, soul, indie rock and more for more than three decades.
“I’ve never been able to play the piano,” Wagner tells the Scene, calling from a family vacation out West. “How do you have two hands doing two different things? So I’ve never been able to do that. Pretty much what I would write was done with my limited skills on the guitar.”
Wagner, a more inventive guitarist than he lets on, made an important discovery in 2019. He realized he could convert guitar audio tracks into MIDI information that could be used to trigger a variety of sounds through software. This revelation led to a prolific bout of writing, and the resulting songs had a flavor not quite like any Wagner had written before. While they’d likely sound odd in the context of musical theater, the process of writing for piano with the guitar guided the songs that would become Showtunes in a new direction.
“When I found I could turn those notes into piano notes, everything changed,” he says. “Suddenly the sound of piano lent itself to a different type of writing. There’s all of these great writers, like Randy Newman or Tom Waits, where they would have these songs that were just them and the piano. I never thought that would be possible, and suddenly it was. Then it really got the ball rolling for me to create music.”
Showtunes opens with lead single “A Chef’s Kiss,” a slowly building, noirish track that considers the passage of time, as Wagner muses over gentle piano, “Life will be the death of us all.” It’s not West Side Story, but there’s a cinematic, anticipatory quality to the song that wouldn’t sound out of place as an overture to a film. In this case, it’s a fitting entry point into this new era for Lambchop.
As is typically the case with Lambchop albums, Wagner worked with both new and longtime collaborators on Showtunes. He worked remotely with Ryan Olson of Poliça and Gayngs and Andrew Broder of Fog, both of whom he met in 2020. Wagner says that thanks in part to the pandemic bringing tours to a standstill, he began to connect with musicians who wouldn’t ordinarily have been free to contribute.
“What’s important about those guys is they’re both producers of music as well as being musicians,” says Wagner. “So they come to the record-making process with a broader understanding of what they’re getting into. … That gives them a different sort of perspective on the thing that they’re working on, and I found that to be interesting. They looked at it with a larger lens.”
Jeremy Ferguson of Nashville’s Battle Tapes Recording also served as co-producer, helping shape the songs to meet Wagner’s vision. And Yo La Tengo’s James McNew fulfilled a longtime dream for Wagner by contributing upright bass to the album — made possible by pandemic-driven remote work.
“I’ve known James for so long,” Wagner says. “He does stuff outside Yo La Tengo, and he’s always busy. So this was a one-time shot. Being able to make a record with James is a real bucket-list thing.”
Wagner had originally conceived of Showtunes as a live performance for Wisconsin’s 2020 Eaux Claires festival, founded by Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner. When the festival was canceled, Showtunes expanded into a larger, recording-driven project, though one that Lambchop will hopefully still have the chance to perform live.
As more people get vaccinated and the COVID-19 pandemic appears to loosen its grip, Wagner is thinking ahead to playing Showtunes, as well as the band’s 2020 covers album TRIP. All the same, dreams of touring and live performances aren’t necessarily top of mind. He says he already has material for new albums in the can, and looks forward to continuing to focus on what he loves best: writing and recording new music.
“There are artists who are performance artists,” Wagner says. “They live for performing and touring. I do enjoy performing, but I’ve been doing it a long time and I’m slowing down a little bit. [Laughs] I think of myself more as a recording artist, which sounds pompous and all that shit. But when we started, Lambchop was about making records. We just didn’t think anyone would actually listen to them.”
