Despite his band’s expansive lineup, Wagner works best alone. “Solitude is required to actually get something done when I’m writing,” he says. “I certainly can’t do it on the road or in hotels or really with anybody around. It stems from the fact that I was trained as a painter and sculptor. And those are solitary endeavors; you really don’t do that with a crowd. That way of creating carried over into my writing.”
Many songs, such as “I’m A Stranger Here” from the 1996 EP Hank and “Gloria Leonard” from 1997’s Thriller, hint at a wholly alienated, almost isolationist worldview. Wagner says of these desolate perspectives, “I don’t think I’m that kind of a gloomy gus. The darkness is there, but then you have a song like ‘Moody Fucker’, which is funny. Accepting and realizing that part of me is kind of silly, isn’t it?”
Fans often want to project the album’s lyrics onto Wagner, who has gone on record as saying that he writes with a degree of detachment, and not for some sort of emo catharsis. Until now.
“Prior to making this record I spent a lot of time being an observer, looking at stuff, and taking those observations — whether it was from another person’s experience or my experience, whatever — and then somehow taking that and giving it some sort of personal point of view,” he explains. “Rather than doing that for this record, being so observant of others, I was looking in myself. That was a way of pointing the camera at me. A lot of the new one is thus more personal. But I honestly don’t think I even write about me in a linear kind of fashion.”
Wagner finds his audience as gleefully difficult to pigeonhole as the music press does his compositions. Lambchop’s following transcends the typical Merge throng of anemic bespectacled man-boys to include actual grown-ups, hetero couples, and even single females attracted by the way Wagner’s monologues make self-doubt seductive rather than defeatist.
“There’s all kinds of jokes about our crowds,” he says. “There are people in the band that have joked that it’s all balding male architects. Ha — maybe that’s been used for Wilco as well. When we play in Europe, the age group is insanely varied. It goes from real young kids to people in their 30s to people in their 50s who haven’t gone to rock shows in a long time but have started to come out and see us play, and there they all are together in the same room. And I can’t think of that as a bad thing.”
Few acts could serve so elliptically as gateway drugs to Toby Keith, Jim Nabors, and beyond. Never sounding committee-penned, Lambchop is the rare collective with a sense of privation, and Kurt Wagner is now more than a decade deep in his quest to share his stingy observations. Equally efficient as a downer or for siring offspring, Damaged will be misremembered as recombinatory by the new converts that it will create, but we longtime cultists know that it’s a deconstructive springboard into the band’s earlier work.
Wagner plans to support Damaged with an American tour accompanied by a string quartet. When asked if the endeavor would result in a recording, he was circumspect: “An album already has come out of it, called Damaged.” Then he cackled again, as if he’d just finished licking the envelope on another randy epistle to Nashville.
William Bowers lives and writes in Florida.
