Biography
Lambchop ranks among the most dependably singular and satisfying U.S. ensembles to surface during the 1990s, forging an uncategorizable fusion of country, soul, jazz, electronics, and avant-garde noise that appeared to absorb influences from every possible stream of modern music. The surreal lyrical wit and droll vocal presence of songwriter and group leader Kurt Wagner served as the unifying force behind those disparate musical strands. Although the band’s label Merge Records once famously labeled them “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band,” that characterization ultimately proved too narrow, since the ensemble never stopped evolving. Their stylistic mix progressed from the detuned country accents of 1996’s How I Quit Smoking and the widescreen Southern-tinged melodies of 2000’s Nixon to the polished chamber pop of 2004’s Aw C’mon and No, You C’mon, the evocative tone poems of 2012’s Mr. M, the coolly expressive electronic surfaces of 2019’s This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You), and 2022’s smart blend of organic and electronic elements, The Bible. Endless personnel shifts across the years made clear that Wagner functioned as Lambchop’s auteur, yet the consistency of his lyrical and melodic vision was matched by an equally steadfast refusal to allow his ideas to grow stale.
Although Lambchop’s continually rotating membership would eventually swell beyond a dozen players, the group originated in 1986 as a basic trio of Wagner, guitarist Jim Watkins, and bassist Marc Trovillion, all former high school classmates. Operating at first under the name Posterchild, the three cut their initial recordings inside Trovillion’s bedroom and self-released a run of cassettes bearing titles such as I’m F*cking Your Daughter. As additional musicians joined, the band began performing regularly throughout the Nashville region, frequently at the local record shop Lucy’s, which Wagner’s wife Mary happened to own.
In 1992 Posterchild—by then comprising Wagner, Trovillion, guitarist Bill Killbrew, clarinetist Jonathan Marx, multi-instrumentalist Scott C. Chase, drummer Steve Goodhue, and percussionist Allen Lowery—issued An Open Fresca + A Moist Towelette, a split single shared with their friends Crop Circle Hoax. The 7" attracted the notice of entertainment lawyer George Regis, who filed cease-and-desist actions on behalf of his clients, the noise-pop band Poster Children. After discarding the proposed names REN, Pinnacles of Cream, and Turd Goes Back, the musicians adopted Lambchop, brought in vocalist/saxophonist Deanna Varagona, steel guitarist Paul Niehaus, and organist John Delworth, and signed with Merge to release the 1993 single “Nine.” Their first full-length, I Hope You’re Sitting Down (aka Jack’s Tulips), arrived the following year. In numerous respects this record remained Lambchop’s most conventional statement; its Nashville roots and torch-and-twang atmosphere briefly saddled the group with the increasingly inaccurate alt-country tag, even though Wagner’s Lou Reed-like vocals and eccentric narrative conceits—most notably the fan favorite “Soaky in the Pooper,” a vivid recounting of a bad LSD trip—immediately underscored the distance separating them from acts such as Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks.
The lovely How I Quit Smoking surfaced in 1996 (though on the subsequent “Cigaretiquette” single Wagner would proudly declare, “I’m smoking again”). Captured live the previous Independence Day, the Hank EP appeared later that same year. Marking the recorded debut of drummer Paul Burch, the EP represented the high point of Lambchop’s Billy Sherrill-inspired period, its lush production recalling the Nashville sound that had dominated three decades earlier yet had already fallen out of favor with Music City’s chart-topping stars. 1997’s Thriller marked a decisive shift; spotlighting the Muscle Shoals soul of “Your Fucking Sunny Day” and featuring three songs written by East River Pipe’s F.M. Cornog, the expansive and challenging album announced the uncompromising eclecticism that would define Lambchop’s output thereafter. The follow-up, 1998’s What Another Man Spills, raised the stakes still higher. On strikingly soulful renditions of Curtis Mayfield’s “Love Song (Give Me Your Love)” and Frederick Knight’s “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” Wagner’s baritone drawl occasionally yielded to a Prince-like falsetto. That same year the group also accompanied Vic Chesnutt on his album The Salesman and Bernadette.
Lambchop’s fifth studio album, Nixon, emerged in the spring of 2000. Presented as a concept record examining the presidency of the controversial Tricky Dick, the project even included a bibliography in its liner notes, though no direct link to the Watergate affair has ever been established. Despite remaining largely unrecognized in their homeland, Lambchop cultivated a considerably larger audience abroad; on May 13, 2000 they performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The concert was documented and offered at U.K. shows that autumn as the limited-edition Queens Royal Trimma EP. (A 2001 European tour produced the Treasure Chest of the Enemy EP.) The 2001 compilation Tools in the Dryer gathered numerous scattered singles, compilation appearances, and remixes.
After committing to the deliberately austere Is a Woman in 2002, Wagner and his colleagues embarked on their most ambitious undertaking to date: the simultaneously released pair Aw C’mon and No, You C’mon, in which Lambchop returned to full strength and were augmented by a lush string section. The following year the musically exploratory EP CoLAB appeared, documenting a studio collaboration between Wagner’s ensemble and the Nashville electronic duo Hands Off Cuba. It was succeeded in the spring of 2006 by The Decline of Country & Western Civilization, Pt. 2: The Woodwind Years, an eclectic anthology of previously uncollected tracks that included the new song “Gettysburg Address,” and later that summer by the all-new Damaged. 2008 brought the characteristically graceful and elegant OH (Ohio), followed in early 2012 by the band’s eleventh full-length, the austere Mr. M, which presented eleven lush, string-laden meditations on love and loss, each dedicated to the late Vic Chesnutt. In 2015 Kurt Wagner launched his electronic side project HeCTA, whose eclectic approach would color Lambchop’s subsequent work. FLOTUS (which Wagner explains stands for “For Love Often Turns Us Still”) appeared in October 2016. The next year the band released the single “The Hustle Unlimited,” an orchestral reworking of the FLOTUS track “The Hustle.” 2019’s This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) found Lambchop intensifying their atmospheric electronic direction and featuring Wagner’s Auto-Tuned vocals. 2020 delivered Trip, an album of cover songs.
Maintaining the group’s revolving-door membership, Wagner collaborated remotely with Yo La Tengo’s James McNew, Gayngs’ Ryan Olson, DJ Twit One, and producer Jeremy Ferguson on Lambchop’s fifteenth album, Showtunes, issued at the start of 2021. The record paid homage, in part, to classic show tunes through a set of eclectic originals. Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder, two musicians from Minneapolis, Minnesota whom Wagner encountered in Berlin during a European tour, were invited to perform on Showtunes. Several months later Broder began streaming solo piano performances online; Wagner, reminded of what he valued in Broder’s playing, requested that he record piano pieces, after which the two began exchanging ideas while Wagner remained at home caring for his ailing father, who had contracted COVID-19, suffered a stroke, and required hip-replacement surgery. Once Wagner shaped Broder’s piano improvisations into songs, he enlisted Broder and Ryan Olson to produce an album around the material; in the summer of 2021 they convened at a former paint factory in Minneapolis with a sizable ensemble of local musicians to realize the songs. The outcome of those Minneapolis sessions was The Bible, issued in September 2022 by Merge Records, which folded funk, R&B, and jazz inflections into Wagner’s literate, elusive music.
Although Lambchop’s continually rotating membership would eventually swell beyond a dozen players, the group originated in 1986 as a basic trio of Wagner, guitarist Jim Watkins, and bassist Marc Trovillion, all former high school classmates. Operating at first under the name Posterchild, the three cut their initial recordings inside Trovillion’s bedroom and self-released a run of cassettes bearing titles such as I’m F*cking Your Daughter. As additional musicians joined, the band began performing regularly throughout the Nashville region, frequently at the local record shop Lucy’s, which Wagner’s wife Mary happened to own.
In 1992 Posterchild—by then comprising Wagner, Trovillion, guitarist Bill Killbrew, clarinetist Jonathan Marx, multi-instrumentalist Scott C. Chase, drummer Steve Goodhue, and percussionist Allen Lowery—issued An Open Fresca + A Moist Towelette, a split single shared with their friends Crop Circle Hoax. The 7" attracted the notice of entertainment lawyer George Regis, who filed cease-and-desist actions on behalf of his clients, the noise-pop band Poster Children. After discarding the proposed names REN, Pinnacles of Cream, and Turd Goes Back, the musicians adopted Lambchop, brought in vocalist/saxophonist Deanna Varagona, steel guitarist Paul Niehaus, and organist John Delworth, and signed with Merge to release the 1993 single “Nine.” Their first full-length, I Hope You’re Sitting Down (aka Jack’s Tulips), arrived the following year. In numerous respects this record remained Lambchop’s most conventional statement; its Nashville roots and torch-and-twang atmosphere briefly saddled the group with the increasingly inaccurate alt-country tag, even though Wagner’s Lou Reed-like vocals and eccentric narrative conceits—most notably the fan favorite “Soaky in the Pooper,” a vivid recounting of a bad LSD trip—immediately underscored the distance separating them from acts such as Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks.
The lovely How I Quit Smoking surfaced in 1996 (though on the subsequent “Cigaretiquette” single Wagner would proudly declare, “I’m smoking again”). Captured live the previous Independence Day, the Hank EP appeared later that same year. Marking the recorded debut of drummer Paul Burch, the EP represented the high point of Lambchop’s Billy Sherrill-inspired period, its lush production recalling the Nashville sound that had dominated three decades earlier yet had already fallen out of favor with Music City’s chart-topping stars. 1997’s Thriller marked a decisive shift; spotlighting the Muscle Shoals soul of “Your Fucking Sunny Day” and featuring three songs written by East River Pipe’s F.M. Cornog, the expansive and challenging album announced the uncompromising eclecticism that would define Lambchop’s output thereafter. The follow-up, 1998’s What Another Man Spills, raised the stakes still higher. On strikingly soulful renditions of Curtis Mayfield’s “Love Song (Give Me Your Love)” and Frederick Knight’s “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” Wagner’s baritone drawl occasionally yielded to a Prince-like falsetto. That same year the group also accompanied Vic Chesnutt on his album The Salesman and Bernadette.
Lambchop’s fifth studio album, Nixon, emerged in the spring of 2000. Presented as a concept record examining the presidency of the controversial Tricky Dick, the project even included a bibliography in its liner notes, though no direct link to the Watergate affair has ever been established. Despite remaining largely unrecognized in their homeland, Lambchop cultivated a considerably larger audience abroad; on May 13, 2000 they performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The concert was documented and offered at U.K. shows that autumn as the limited-edition Queens Royal Trimma EP. (A 2001 European tour produced the Treasure Chest of the Enemy EP.) The 2001 compilation Tools in the Dryer gathered numerous scattered singles, compilation appearances, and remixes.
After committing to the deliberately austere Is a Woman in 2002, Wagner and his colleagues embarked on their most ambitious undertaking to date: the simultaneously released pair Aw C’mon and No, You C’mon, in which Lambchop returned to full strength and were augmented by a lush string section. The following year the musically exploratory EP CoLAB appeared, documenting a studio collaboration between Wagner’s ensemble and the Nashville electronic duo Hands Off Cuba. It was succeeded in the spring of 2006 by The Decline of Country & Western Civilization, Pt. 2: The Woodwind Years, an eclectic anthology of previously uncollected tracks that included the new song “Gettysburg Address,” and later that summer by the all-new Damaged. 2008 brought the characteristically graceful and elegant OH (Ohio), followed in early 2012 by the band’s eleventh full-length, the austere Mr. M, which presented eleven lush, string-laden meditations on love and loss, each dedicated to the late Vic Chesnutt. In 2015 Kurt Wagner launched his electronic side project HeCTA, whose eclectic approach would color Lambchop’s subsequent work. FLOTUS (which Wagner explains stands for “For Love Often Turns Us Still”) appeared in October 2016. The next year the band released the single “The Hustle Unlimited,” an orchestral reworking of the FLOTUS track “The Hustle.” 2019’s This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) found Lambchop intensifying their atmospheric electronic direction and featuring Wagner’s Auto-Tuned vocals. 2020 delivered Trip, an album of cover songs.
Maintaining the group’s revolving-door membership, Wagner collaborated remotely with Yo La Tengo’s James McNew, Gayngs’ Ryan Olson, DJ Twit One, and producer Jeremy Ferguson on Lambchop’s fifteenth album, Showtunes, issued at the start of 2021. The record paid homage, in part, to classic show tunes through a set of eclectic originals. Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder, two musicians from Minneapolis, Minnesota whom Wagner encountered in Berlin during a European tour, were invited to perform on Showtunes. Several months later Broder began streaming solo piano performances online; Wagner, reminded of what he valued in Broder’s playing, requested that he record piano pieces, after which the two began exchanging ideas while Wagner remained at home caring for his ailing father, who had contracted COVID-19, suffered a stroke, and required hip-replacement surgery. Once Wagner shaped Broder’s piano improvisations into songs, he enlisted Broder and Ryan Olson to produce an album around the material; in the summer of 2021 they convened at a former paint factory in Minneapolis with a sizable ensemble of local musicians to realize the songs. The outcome of those Minneapolis sessions was The Bible, issued in September 2022 by Merge Records, which folded funk, R&B, and jazz inflections into Wagner’s literate, elusive music.
Singles
