I smell pork chops. Less than a foot behind me, a couple is cutting into dinner as a plate of crusted walleye passes inches from my head.
This isn’t quite how I imagined I’d hear the new Lambchop album.
Crooners Supper Club, a music venue on the edge of Minneapolis and Fridley, typically serves up jazz and old pop standards. But the unexpected is its blue plate special.
I first saw Kurt Wagner, the man behind Lambchop, just after the 2012 release of Mr. M, a dramatically different album than the new, hymn-inspired Punching the Clown. Watching in a dark New York City club that spring night, I would not have expected Lambchop’s already delicate songwriting to seek out even more frangible spaces. Nor would I have expected Minnesota to take a central role in the veteran Nashville songwriter’s art.
Yet, here is Punching the Clown, a rival to Nixon and Is a Woman for the finest in Wagner’s 17-record oeuvre.
Punching the Clown makes you lean forward to make sure you aren't missing the details. Each fragile song is sparsely populated by guitar, banjo, and a small chorus of voices that trails Wagner's baritone. Lyrically, he remains evasive and alluring, and even when it's not clear his tales is going somewhere specific, many of the destinations—musically and narratively—have ties to Minnesota.
Punching the Clown was produced by Ryan Olson (Poliça, Marijuana Deathsquads), features Bon Iver's Justin Vernon on banjo, was partially recorded at Vernon’s April Base Studios in western Wisconsin, includes guest spots from local musicians like Randall Throckmorton and L.A. Buckner, and is illustrated by a cover photo by the Minnesota-based artist Graham Tolbert.
The album even opens with a song titled “Just West of Nicollet.”
“I find that whole city and the surrounding region, there's something really magnetic that's drawing me toward it, both creatively and just in a lot of other ways,” Wagner tells me by phone weeks before the album’s release. “I don’t know what y’all got up there in the water or whatever. It’s good stuff.”
Minnesota-based musician and producer Andrew Broder has emerged as a central collaborator for Wagner. Broder’s role has grown on each of the last three Lambchop albums; on Punching the Clown, he’s credited as a co-writer on almost every song.
“Writing for somebody else, it’s interesting because it is a little akin to what I do with rappers,” Broder says. “Making a beat for a rapper, it's like, OK, here's a palette for you to do your thing. It was kind of applying that sensibility of being a producer and making a beat for a rapper or a vocalist. But instead of doing it with samplers and drum machines, you're doing it with guitar.”
Punching the Clown is one of Lambchop’s most focused albums. The entire project takes inspiration from lined-out hymnody, a tradition of notationless call-and-response psalm singing where a leader sings a line of text and the congregation repeats it back.
Wagner says his path to lined-out singing began when he tried to ID “something kind of Carter Family-ish" he'd heard on the radio.
“Next thing I know, I stumbled on this type of singing," he says. "Some people in North Carolina were doing it, and I started digging into that. I was really taken aback. It was pretty hillbilly, man. But it was also just insanely powerful and moving.”
Wagner had already played with the idea of working with choral music for the new record, and lined-out hymnody became a reference point for building his new album.
Broder says Wagner’s vision for the album was clear from the start.
“He sort of had this vibe imagined in his mind of lined-out singing and this very stripped-down approach,” Broder says. “I think initially he was thinking more like banjo, but then it kind of morphed into guitar with banjo. In concept, it was this very minimal approach, one stringed instrument plus him plus choir.”
The call-and-response vocals weave through Punching the Clown in sometimes subtle ways. In the casual confines of Crooners, the inspiration was magnified, with Wagner sitting in a chair between Broder and vocalists Throckmorton and Alex Sauser-Monnig, who trailed him through the new songs.
“Those [trailing] voices are another character, equally as important as the one that I'm representing as the narrator or whatever you want to call it,” Wagner says.
The recording is as intimate as the live performance. His voice stripped of Auto-Tune and other effects he’s used in the past, Wagner could be sitting in a chair on the porch next to you.
The effect can be melancholy. In folk musicologist Alan Lomax’s recordings of the style, there’s an emotional chasm between the listener and performers. The songs can sound morose even though they emerge from a place of worship and hope. That’s a similar tone struck in songs like “Just West of Nicollet,” “Andrew Jackson Asshat,” and “Weakend.”
“I love being a little bit deceptive about what it is you're hearing because I think just questioning what you're hearing starts a sort of dialogue in your brain about a deeper understanding of what you just are listening to,” Wagner says. “But you have to be open to it.”
Wagner, who describes himself as "a Nashville guy who just never participated in the Nashville thing," hasn't moved to Minnesota, but he draws inspiration from our creative climate and our artists.
Following the July show I caught at Crooners, the first Lambchop performance in four years, Wagner is returning for two more, on August 30 and September 27.
“I literally can't get enough of Minnesota,” he says. “I enjoy working there so much. Just the possibilities. It's vibrant. People are hardworking, it's growing, it's alive, and the people are sharing these things both through the art of it all, but also just by hanging out and enjoying each other's company.”
And chief among those people, for Wagner, are Olson and Broder.
“That sort of changed my life, meeting up with Ryan and Andrew,” Wagner says. “I just think they are both brilliant—so brilliant that surely some of that could rub off on me.”
Lambchop
With: Randall Throckmorton, Mike Davis
Where: Crooners Supper Club, 6161 Hwy. 65 NE, Minneapolis
When: 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30
Tickets: $25/$35; find more info here
