Home
sign up| features / music interview |
 content by: editor |
 lambchop interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Kurt Wagner gets better. Nashville’s bastions of experimental country/soul/jazz are set to return with Damaged, their eighth album of shimmering melancholy. It’s already being hailed as their masterpiece but, as the title hints, it’s a record with scars, dissecting an annus horribilis in which frontman Kurt Wagner endured a cancer scare. Happily, Wagner, now healthy and chipper in his trademark Seed Company cap, has no problem revisiting his long dark journey of the soul. “I don’t usually go back and listen to our old records, but this one still sounds good to me. I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way, I just mean I’m not cringing when I play this one.” One of the highlights of Damaged is the song Paperback Bible. Originally written for a documentary about a Tennessee Public Radio phone-in programme called Swap Shop (itself a sort of car boot sale for the airwaves), its lyrics are constructed entirely of verbatim quotes from the participants’ on-air exchanges. Cleverly collaged together by Wagner against rippling folk guitars and soaring strings, it’s a thing of unlikely poignancy. The litany of “only worn once” party dresses, malfunctioning TVs and questionable hand guns building ineffably into aching narratives of small town life.  “It’s all quotes from the show, though I did cheat on one word”, Wagner admits. “It’s very satisfying when you try something like that then find that it actually works. It’s a technique I learned at film school in Montana. I made this drama using only existing words from print, TV and so on. My professor happened to be (nowadays Hollywood A-lister) Bill Pullman; he liked it and he made another class he was teaching perform it. Then I forgot all about it. I guess my songwriting has always been about observing the minutiae of life.” Wagner’s art-school background points up Lambchop’s detachment from their more overtly commercial Music City neighbours. “We’re just a bit too weird a notion for Nashville”, he acknowledges with a sigh. “It’s not a city that exactly relates to oddity. Musicians come to Nashville to have someone hand them a career. I started out making records so I had something to give to my friends…”
David Sheppard
Lambchop - Damaged, released 14 August 06 on City Slang.
 comments
Read members' comments related to this music.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
music  music archive Watch music sessions and interviews from 2002 to 2008. books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
lambchop
lambchop
lambchop
lambchop
access 1000s of articles