Kurt Wagner
It took about 10 seconds of listening before my brain declared Punching the Clown, the new album from Lambchop, as Lambchop’s best album. Granted, my brain has said this about every new Lambchop record for the past, oh, three decades. Each album makes me more excited for the next, and when the new one arrives, it gives me new appreciation for what came before it. With Kurt Wagner at the helm of the mutable project, Lambchop has shaped and shepherded some of the most intriguing music — and musicians — to ever come from Nashville. On Punching the Clown, out Friday via Merge, Wagner attains new levels of beauty and intimacy with his craft, finding new life in old forms.
“It was magic, man,” Wagner tells the Scene. “Straight-up magic. Just three days. We had an idea of what we wanted to do. We knew the songs already. We knew the order they were in. All we had to do was just put it all together and just hit it. … I could have just got hit by a truck and it’d be fine. It could have come on out.”
Sparse and soulful, Punching the Clown was written with Andrew Broder, produced by Ryan Olson, features banjo from Justin Vernon (and was recorded at the Wisconsin studio April Base where Vernon has made many Bon Iver records) and was engineered by longtime collaborator and former Nashvillian Mark Nevers. Built around the call and response of lined-out singing with shape notes — a form of choral singing that presaged widespread literacy and is an antecedent of American gospel and country, popularized here in the mid-19th century via the Sacred Harp tradition — Punching continues Wagner’s ongoing exploration of the possibilities of the human voice. Swells of deep, harmonious humanity build and sweep across the barren plains of minimalist picking and enigmatic electronic flourishes. Wagner connects his latest fascinations to the course he’s been charting since the very beginning.
“Getting my shit together as a writer I think was really tough,” he says. “I mean, I wanted to — I ain’t the youngest guy on the block. It was time to really see if I could just rise to the occasion. Because I felt that conceptually it was solid, and I just needed to have the songs. And knowing that that was really the crux of the whole thing was songs — actual songs and songwriting.
“That gave me a place to start. But the bar was pretty high, so I wasn’t settling for anything. And so it took a lot of work. I thought I was going insane, but got through it. And then at some point you get to this place where everything starts to click, and then you’re in that space. I didn’t want to leave it, because I knew as soon as I turned this record in, that ain’t happening for a while.”
The record he turned in is an incisive work of observation and abstraction. Wagner’s voice sounds as warm as ever — something to be confident in even when the character who’s singing isn’t confident. He relies on subtle shadings to convey big emotions, leading the choir of singers who join him beyond the realm of genre. “A Doctor in the House” walks a knife’s edge between chamber country and baroque folk. “The New World Wave” feels like the Anita Kerr Singers got ahold of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Night Owl. It all feels very new and very old. Even though what exactly “Lambchop” is has changed often over the years, it all feels very Lambchop.
“I just kind of dug in and really worked hard at writing for at least about a year-and-a-half, almost two years,” recalls Wagner. “And with the notion of what kind of record I wanted to make and who I wanted to make it with. But I needed to really sort of dig deep and try to become better at being a writer. It took a while, but I loved it.
“I loved just disappearing and trying to just really get down to it. What makes me like stuff? What makes a good song? Why did people make music and then decide it’s good? Real, pretty unanswerable kind of questions, but worthy of pursuit.”
The craftsmanship starts with these conceptual joists, creating harmonic and narrative space for Wagner’s characters to exist, to take up space, to simply be. The detective in “Cigar,” the honkies in “White People,” the “human calculator” from “Just West of Nicollet” — they all pass by like trucks outside the diner window, distance separating us from the rest of the story. The way Wagner appreciates an abstraction, placing his vowels in percussive succession on “Afterburner” and “No Chicago,” reflects a molecular analysis of what makes music magical. The call and response between song and singer makes for profound listening, just like always.
“And that’s the beautiful thing about songs, that they can live on in various guises and ways of presentation and all that stuff. They just exist. But a song in itself is almost like a guidebook or something [open] to anyone’s sort of creative interpretation. And that’s pretty unique.”
