A WORLD IN TURMOIL BUT LAMBCHOP PREVAILS AND WIND BACK WEDNESDAY IS NOT SURPRISED
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There has been a return to the fray, or at least to our attention, this year from Kurt Wagner’s Nashville moodists, aka “Nashville’s most fucked up country band”, Lambchop. The new album, Punching The Clown, is sad and beautiful, of course, historical and topical, perhaps surprisingly, and both spare musically and rich vocally, with some folk choirs joining our (now hairier) man, Kurt.
In keeping, Wind Back Wednesday steps back 20 years to the then-new album, Damaged, which took a surprising turn from the characters to the personal, added a layer of wordliness about a world with distemper, while remaining core Lambchop. Much like Wagner, who is essentially Lambchop, but in 2006 wasn’t sure that being the focus all of a sudden of close attention was the smartest move he’d made.
But then closeness of all sorts was really what this was all about, wasn’t it Kurt?
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WHEN DAMAGED, the new album from the Nashville country-soul ensemble Lambchop arrived recently, all hushed and close and imbued with a sadness which went beyond the surface to something deeply personal, the common response was to marvel at how intimate it was. But given an earlier Lambchop album, Is A Woman, felt like we were intruding on one man's bedroom as he sang to himself, you have to ask when it comes to Lambchop how much more intimate could they get?
Kurt Wagner, Lambchop's songwriter and singer chuckles at this. He chuckles a lot, with a rheumy sound which suggests his lifelong and steady cigarette habit has done more than stain his fingers. It's a good circuit breaker, or distracter, when he needs to avoid a question.
But this time around he is finding it harder to distract enquiries. The intimacy of Damaged is more than the close sound; it's also a lyrical openness quite different to the storytelling, observational style Wagner has employed previously. It wasn't planned, he claims not entirely convincingly, it was just where his "little sieve of a brain" was going.
One line on the album has Wagner singing "you know we never talk of heavy things", though of course he has, many times, in song. But he's been able to talk about heavy things and be comfortable with it because it generally hasn't been about him. So how comfortable is he now with talking about heavy things when they are about him?
"I'm not really good at it," he laughs. "I'm really not. I'm not one to charge forward and really get into it."
But as the more confessional singer/songwriters could tell him, if you don't explain, aassumptions can be made.
"And they have been and they haven't been all that correct, but that's partly my fault by virtue of not been nearly specific about what was going on," Wagner admits.
On hearing the album an English journalist asked him if his marriage was on the rocks. Wagner's response was that "that was the first thing my wife said when she heard Damaged: 'This sounds like a break-up record!' I had to reassure her that there were other things on my mind. It certainly wasn't that."
The other things on his mind were almost simultaneous discovery of a degenerative jaw disease (which forced him to temporarily stop smoking) and something else which looked like it would develop into cancer while around him his friends were having their own personal crises and the world was buried deep in fear, war and cynicism.
"As much as a lot is being made out of this being a personal record, it really is a reflection that it wasn't just what was going on with me, it was going on with everyone I knew, the world, the fucking climate," says Wagner. "It was all happening in this very intense period of time. It happens in people's lives; it happens in mine every seven to 10 years."
I suggest to Wagner that the past few years have had a similar feeling to the mid to late ‘70s, where settling on us all was a kind of existential gloom where the view was that you couldn't trust the structures of your life, from the government down, that the potential for imminent war hovered above us. It's a mood which seems to be replicated today.
"The big difference to me was that there was a kind of adolescent naiveté that was going on earlier on as we were thrust into adulthood," he says. "Now, it's like it's happening again and we are moving on alone and you become much more fatalist about it. Is there any chance? I don't know. I'm struggling with it as I am sure a lot of people are."
Maybe it's not a coincidence that we have seen the return of the '70s-style intimate singer/songwriter in the past few years.
"One of things I found is that as crazy and depressing and terrifying as things seemed to be in the world, I tend to go towards, tend to reach for the people I love. You want them even closer to you and of course that intensifies all these emotions that you have."
The perspective that Wagner could bring to it which would be different from a twentysomething songwriter is that having lived through it 25 years ago maybe it easier for him to see some hope.
"I'm trying you know. I'm really trying to find a way to continue on. I think without that hope thing, it's just total misery. That's how I am trying to deal with it. I'm still a pretty jovial, chuckly dude."
Lambchop - Punching The Clown is out now.
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