“When I was real young and going to art school, I was fully cognizant of the fact that I would be working my entire life at some other type of work, but that I’d have my nights and weekends to do what I wanted to do. I accepted that reality very early on. It took a very long time for me to unaccept that fact. Even to this day I still wonder if I’ve made that transition or not. Am I still missing that stability and anchor in my life? Because music is a fairly anchorless proposition.”
Wagner doesn’t think he is without idiomatic cousins in the music world, however. Vic Chesnutt was an influence who later became a collaborator and pal. “Vic was a very big guidepost for me becoming a writer,” Wagner says. “Developing a relationship with him as a friend, and as a total fucking fan, learning from someone like him, had a big impression on me. The same people had a big impression on us: Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt. These are people that we both share as people we admire as writers.”
Van Zandt and Cohen were both recently done cinematic justice, and Wagner purchased tickets to screenings of both documentaries. “The new Leonard Cohen film, I’m Your Man, is great and really puts him on this whole other level,” he says. “A lot of people have a problem with the way Cohen produced and presented his music, but you get to see the songs done by others, and you can hear what astounding songs they are.” Lambchop has taken a similarly wardish approach to versions of songs that they love by (I-rockers) East River Pipe and Dump, in addition to renditions of classics by Curtis Mayfield, American Music Club, the Rolling Stones, Teddy Pendergrass, and the Kinks.
“I can see people getting broken up after the Townes Van Zandt film Be Here To Love Me,” he continues. “It’s tough to look at in a way, but part of me also thinks, hey, he was who he was, he had the life that he had, and he still created some really amazing things. He had a looming presence in Nashville, in addition to his Texas reputation. Right when I was first farting around with writing songs, he would play all these nearby clubs and I would go down and see him. He was one of the first songwriters I was drawn to, and the performances were always an interesting affair. You never really knew what was going to happen, but I really liked that element.”
Though every Lambchop album boasts a song involving alcohol or its influence, Wagner doesn’t overdrink. “It’s part of what I do,” he says. “I have a nice drink or two, no more or less than anybody else. Not like the end of Townes Van Zandt. God no. I’m a fairly moderate person in all aspects of my life. But I’m not a prude, either.”
A moderate hand does seem to guide Lambchop. Songs populating the poles of their oeuvre vary from orchestral to rambunctious, but the large median is decidedly midtempo, loping, even downbeat. “We just try to get the best songs from the band that we can in the context of while we’re making it,” Wagner suggests. “And then we hope that people like it.
“The songs’ slowness is just a natural thing. There is a rock element in what we do. Maybe it’s not as evident in the way that we sound now. A high percent of our B-sides are pretty rocking. It’s just that when I’m trying to make a record, it has a certain sound or personality of its own. What we do is we look at what we’ve done on the record previous to that, and then we try to go in another direction. We definitely try not to repeat ourselves. We take the things we’ve learned and it becomes part of what we sound like. We just add other elements to it, or subtract them.”
Wagner isn’t dreamless enough to yield that his music doesn’t belong in stadiums or dance clubs, however. “Part of me wonders, why the hell isn’t there a more meditative communal forum for this music?” he asks. “OK, we do demand a certain amount of the listener. Patience. I respect the fact that listeners are intelligent. The right context for this music is: wherever’s comfortable. Not ergonomic chairs, but — for example, we were making the record and I had to put it on an iPod to go away for Thanksgiving, way the fuck up north. It was like minus four degrees and I was outside smoking cigarettes, listening to it on the pod, and that was it: Perfect. Way below freezing in Saginaw, Michigan, outside, having a cigarette — sounded great.”
Cigarettes wiped out Wagner’s falsetto, which had a great three-album run in the ’90s, when soul music threatened to become the band’s central preoccupation. Their retro fetish was ahead of its time; well-regarded critics’ darlings such as Antony & the Johnsons and Cat Power have recently released albums that sound like what Lambchop was doing half a decade ago. “Well, I don’t want to blow my own horn or anything but yeah, I hear it,” Wagner concurs. “I don’t know if I have any kind of influence, but that sound is something people responded to then and are responding to again.”
Lambchop’s studio and rehearsal process of fleshing out Wagner’s songs shares several qualities with the collaborative nature of recording during soul’s golden age. “Particularly the last four or five records,” he says, “the way that the songs end up being has been a result of letting people shape it, take it, arrange it, and make it so that it’s as much their own as it is mine.” Tony Crow’s piano and Paul Niehaus’ steel guitar are probably responsible for that consortium of Lambchop fans who dig the sound but could not quote a lyric.
Wagner’s leadership style, and his countrified leanings, shine through in his preference for heavier-handed soul auteurs. “If a debate was Memphis or Detroit, it’s Memphis all the way,” he says. “But there are some Philly things I appreciate as well. Detroit is cool, but Memphis had that southern thing that is something I respond to. When I think of that genre of music, that’s the first place on the dial I would go.”
