Lambchop's Kurt Wagner on Driving, Listening to the Radio, and Vic Chesnutt's Legacy

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Here's what I'm serving up today: Lambchop is an indie rock institution, and Kurt Wagner's latest record for the long-running band, Punching the Clown (which just saw release last week), is somehow one of their best in a career full of "one of their best" albums. My jaw literally dropped the first time I heard it, and I'm astounded by how often Kurt continues to reinvent his own sonic approach; if you could call him under-appreciated in today's indie landscape, hopefully Punching the Clown goes a long way towards ginning up some much-deserved appreciation, as he continues to be one of the most fascinating American songwriters currently living.

I last interviewed Kurt back in 2012 around the time of the similarly excellent Mr. Met for Pitchfork's 5-10-15-20 series, and I was more than happy to link up again with him 14 years later—and our conversation was even more exploratory and fascinating than the last time we chatted. I hope y'all enjoy this one, check it out:

This new record is phenomenal. I always love what you do, but this one really blew me away. The origins of its creation were from a song you heard while you were getting gas.
I had this idea rattling around in my head that I wanted to explore, and then I was going to get gas one day and this song came on that personified what I was thinking about and solidified it—because it was real. I was like, "Wow, that's all you need—banjo, and some singing." It struck me as uncommonly beautiful. There was nothing to it, because the manager was just like, "Clunk," and it only hit on the one and that was that. It was mostly just the beauty of these voices—and they weren't particularly skilled.

It was Carter family-ish. It definitely wasn't the Carter family, but it had that vibe to it. I couldn't remember much about its content. I really tried to fucking find it. It was on a community radio station, and they don't really back-announce anything. It was up to me to do a little hunt, and I never could fucking figure it out. But I found a lot of interesting information that supported the idea I was thinking about, so it was handy from that point of view. Maybe it wasn't that important that I knew who the fuck it was. Maybe it was enough just to hear it and settle my brain a little bit.

I'm 39, but I'm still old enough to remember what it was like to listen to the radio and hear something where it's like, "I don't know what this is." That's a very specific form of discovering music that's underrated at this point.
Well, it sort of disappeared, unless you follow NTS or something. There was a time pandemic-wise where people were taking to the radio, and it was like a lifeline. You got to hear your friends speak and share music with each other, and it was cool. I've always enjoyed that, because listening to somebody you know express themselves through their choice of music they wanted to share with you is pretty intimate, in a way.

I can't believe you're 39, dude. You must've been a baby the last time we spoke.

That was 2012, so yeah, I was very young!
I do remember that conversation, and it was right at the final show of a long fucking tour. I can't even remember it. I do know I was exhausted and really didn't want to do it. But you were very gentle with me. I remember that. I got through it and went, "Damn, that wasn't so bad."

I thought it was a great interview. You mentioned NTS before. What's your general radio-listening proclivities in general?
Whatever's easy. Usually, it's whatever's in the car. I do go to NTS, because my friend James McNew has a really great show on there. I love listening to his choices and music a lot. It's always great, and it reminds me of that era when I would listen a lot to WFMU—which I also listened to a lot during the pandemic as well. For some reason, radio—or, at least, the experience of real radio—seemed to hit me just right. Again, it's that sharing of music that felt more personal than the way a lot of commercial radio is now, which is very impersonal.

DJs have become less frequent on commercial radio in general, obviously—and that's without factoring AI into the equation.
Fantastic. [Laughs] I mean, I'm sure they're great—until they're not. That's another extension of algorithmic programming. I'm not sure they can pull that off exactly with radio because...well, I'm sure they can figure it out. [Laughs]

They'll certainly try! What kind of car do you drive lately?
I'm driving around right now in my dad's Camry. He did a weird thing when he was, like, 91 years old. He decided to buy a new fucking car, and I was like, "You don't even drive." It's a sedan, it's very comfortable and all that. When he passed away, it had four or five thousand miles on it. He didn't drive it, but he'd get driven around in it. It's really not my style, but it's pristine, and I definitely needed a new car. It's weird. We call it "the caddy"—even though it's not, but it's a step up for my ass.

Have you historically liked driving in general?
Love-hate. Traffic's gotten so horrible around here. That's no fun. Every now and then, I don't mind driving on the road. That's kind of cool. But even then, I'm just getting old and way too full of anxiety to deal with big cities. I like the option of not driving a lot as much as I can—but I live in a town where you absolutely have to drive, or take a Waymo. You gotta pick one option, and usually getting yourself there is the better option. I'm gonna have to try this robot Waymo thing, because it's gotta be strange. They've invaded Nashville. It's insane. It's unsettling to glance over and [see] nobody in the car.

I don't think I would like it. Remind me, how long have you lived in Nashville at this point?
I grew up here in the '60s, I left for 10 years, and then I moved back in '86. I've been here for a while since then. I spent 10 years in Memphis, Montana, Chicago.

Talk to me about how you've seen Nashville change over the years.
Oh, it's very dramatic, and traumatic for someone who grew up in a completely different place. Everything about the place is different. As a kid growing up in a redneck small city-ish—I'd almost say it was a small town, and all that goes along with it in the '60s—to seeing what it is now, I could never have imagined it could go this far to the other extreme. It's turned a lot of the locals off—some left. Still, living in the South, I really do appreciate—but, I could spend a good five, six months out of the year in New York, no problem.

This record was laid down at April Base over the course of three days.
It took about a year and a half—maybe a little longer—to make that a reality. But because of that, we only needed three days. It was pretty ambitious, what we were trying to do, but we were so well-prepared at that point that we just went in and did it. There were some wild cards, and I didn't really know what it was all going to sound like. It was all conceptual. But it immediately sounded great, and we just had a ball. It was fantastic. I'd never felt that prepared. We had the tracklist before we even made the record, which helped envision what we wanted in each of these songs—maybe to the detriment of the songs standing alone, even though I think they're all great, which I rarely say. We were done after three days, and it was like, "I'm done. I can get hit by a bus tomorrow and I know it'll be just fine."

In the press materials, you mention working on being a better songwriter, which is, an interesting thing to hear any songwriter express honestly. Talk to me about how you've viewed your songwriting skills over the years.
The motivation for being a better songwriter came from the fact that we knew who was going to be involved in all this from the beginning—and part of that made me go, "Well, I better get my fucking shit together." Prior to that, for a while I'd tried a lot of different approaches to songwriting. In some cases, maybe I'd gotten complacent about what was involved with it, or I was satisfied way too easily. I don't think that was the case when I started out at all. I was trying to figure out, what is a good song? What makes an artist or a writer decide it's good? I'm not sure I came up with an answer, but at least I was asking the fucking question, and I was getting into stuff like magic and madness, all these things. Is this what it is?

I started studying what everybody was doing—everybody I could fucking think of. I'd dig deep and read their books, biographies, interviews, trying to figure out what's the connection between their life and their art. I don't think I'd ever really gone there before. I'd sort of accepted songwriting at face value. I did this thing, I made it, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so great, and then [I'm] moving on to the next thing. I did know that hard work was part of it. That would come in spurts, because of the nature of making a record and doing all that shit. It would get interrupted, and it was something you'd have to jumpstart, because I found it difficult to maintain all the time.

Having a break of a couple of years dedicated to solely doing the best I can got to a point where, after a lot of struggle and writing terrible shit—not terrible, but just not satisfactory for what I was going for—finally, things started to in a little bit of a groove. And that was so fucking fun, man. Suddenly, I didn't want it to stop—and I knew as soon as I turned in this record, it was going to stop. That was a little hard to reconcile. That's quite a price to pay for moderate recognition for something you've made. But here I am.

I drifted from that one pretty good. I'm sorry. I do tend to wander.

Are you kidding me? This is why I run my own publication. I love conversations.
Congratulations on that, by the way. I know it's hard out there.

It comes with its own challenges, but honestly, doing something yourself is pretty rewarding these days. For starters, there's not much else of an option! Who are some contemporary songwriters that you admire?
Man, there's a good crop of really young songwriters right now. I don't know what's happening, but the notion of song and songwriting seems to be really strong at the moment. They're all really young, and they're fantastic. It's the ones you would think are notable, because they become successful to some extent—guys like Jake Lenderman or Cameron Winter. Dan Wriggins from Friendship, he's a great writer. They all know each other and interact. Even the fellow Nate, the guy from Water from Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei, incredible fucking songwriters. It's interesting—when you read about them, they're aware of the same music that inspired me to be a songwriter. It seems like it's working on them as well. They're just doing it their way, but there's something about the way they use language. There's a bunch of others that I'm probably forgetting right now. but those are the young kids that would be recognizable names. I'll listen to the shit out of their stuff.

When I was working on this record, I was so into what Jake did—and then I realized that I'd been listening to his stuff for a while, prior to everybody knowing about it. Boat Songs is an incredible record as far as songwriting goes, if nothing else.

When his latest record came out, someone remarked to me that they felt like they'd been living with those songs for forever already.
Yeah, it's like, "Wow, that's a hit I missed back in the day." It's like a puzzle, and there's something about the nature of a puzzle and trying to figure stuff out that I enjoy. I like crossword puzzles, and I like songs that are puzzling. If they're too easy to figure out and they're still good, then maybe they're not that great. When I can't fucking figure it out but I don't know why, I think it's great. What makes something good? What makes us like it? What makes them write it and go, "Okay, I'm done"? I think these younger people also have a better handle on knowing what not to share, even though they're from a generation of sharing. Maybe that taught them not to share every fucking thought that comes across your bow.

I'll be totally honest with you—I think they saw a lot of the pitfalls that my age group went through in the 2010s, and they were like, "Right, okay, this is what not to do." Which is smart. That's how you should operate.
It's an exciting time, because these guys are all active artists putting out music pretty regularly. They seem to work really hard, and I admire hard work in people. That's how you get things done.

Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder are part of Lambchop's core band at this point. I'm very familiar with their work outside of the band, and they usually bring something very distinctive musically to what they work on. Talk to me about how they function as members of Lambchop and what you value most about them.
I could go on and on about Ryan. I think he's a flat-out genius. He's also very intimidating. I often find that I feel really stupid in his presence, mainly just because he's just got a really brilliant mind and he doesn't suffer bullshit. For whatever reason, he puts up with my ass, and I'm fine with that. Ryan and Andrew unlocked this whole world of Minneapolis for me, to the point where that's pretty much where I operate out of. I gradually worked my way into it, but it's been four or five years, and it's where I do all my work. The community there is incredible. All these guys hang around each other, know each other, enjoy each other's company, and they're all brilliant. It's just so inspiring to be around that sort of energy, where they like making shit and they don't really care about anything else. They're not like Nashville at all, where it's always about shit other than music. Up there, it's just remarkable. I can't get enough of that. It's taken me a while to figure out how to mesh my whatever I do in with that. At first, I just completely gave myself over to it. Then, I realized that I could probably contribute a bit more and it would feel like a better balance.

Andrew Broder, this album probably isn't a really great example of what he does. This is him entertaining this concept I had and having the incredible flexibility to excel at whatever he puts his mind to. We share the same thing—we were both painters—so we have this language of communicating about art that's about the bigger thing, and I think Ryan shares that too. Ryan is a flat-out artist all the way. Canvases are varied and can be many things. But his brain moves so fast, it's a unique marvel. That's the kind of person I like to work with—someone that makes me feel stupid. I couldn't wait to hear what his take on this stuff was. Working with him from the concept up was so important. Within 24 hours of me pitching him what I had in mind, he goes, "Okay, we're set"—and I went, "What?" And then a year and a half later, it actually happened.

But he did tell me that I got to get my shit together, which is exactly what I needed to hear. And it's not like this is his forte this type of music—and I love that. I wanted to see how he could apply his aesthetic and personality while contributing something that's new and a little challenging for him as well. It was the same with Andrew. I don't know if it was on Andrew's dance card to send me acoustic guitar demos, with the only caveat was that it needed to be a hit. I mean, I was facetious, but I actually knew that he's capable of writing hits—and he put his mind to it. It got to the point where I was literally cussing him out, going, "Damn, man, how the fuck am I going to write to this?" So I had to get my shit together, because these guys are good.

I've always felt like this when I'm in the room, surrounded by the musicians I work with. That's not a bad thing, but it helps me get better, and I'm working at it. I want to have fun, I want these people I work with to have fun, and I want to work with my friends and people I know. That's what I'm going to get out of it: A good hang and a good experience—and, hopefully, something I'm proud of.

The DJ drop in "Just West of Nicollet" took me by surprise. It's this little idiosyncratic moment. I actually had to rewind the record and be like, "Is this actually in here?"
That's what Ryan does. That's his instrument, and how he contributes to stuff as a band member as much as a producer. His approach to this type of music was, any time you think you're getting comfortable, he breaks the fourth wall and keeps you going. You're like, "Okay, I'm digging this, this is cool," and then there's this "What the fuck?" moment that sets up the rest of what's about to unfold. There's a moment in "White People" where, all of a sudden, there's this crunched sound that comes at the very emotionally charged moment, and it snaps you right out of it and into something that's even harder than you would've achieved without it. I can't imagine this record not having that stuff, because it's what makes it travel in new territory as far as how we consider this kind of music.

People have been tinkering with genre and format for a long time, but Ryan does it in a way which is very considered. A lot of it has to do with timing and these little things happening at precisely the right moment. I met him right around the time that he made Swamp Dogg's Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, and the first track on that record just makes you go, "What the fuckin' hell?" That was him being very casual with his gifts and skills, but to great effect—and it really left an impression on me, how he would chop up the experience of listening into making something unique and new. All of his little touches are all incredible.

In the end, I just wanted to make it something you hadn't heard before. And I guess we did that. I didn't know if it was going to be enough, and it turned out that it was more than enough—and, shit, maybe we should have turned that shit up some more, you know? I think he probably would agree with me, you know, because he was like, "Man, that thing should be louder," and I was like, "That's pretty fucking loud now." But now that I think about it, he's right.

When I interviewed you back in 2012, one of the last things we talked about was dealing with the grief of Vic Chesnutt's passing. He's somebody who a lot of these younger songwriters we were talking about—MJ Lenderman, specifically—have been clearly inspired by to some extent. When we talked, you said you were still struggling with losing Vic. I'm curious to hear you reflect on that loss and his legacy kind of as it stands now.
I think about him all the time. and still all these years since then. He's very much a living presence in the way I think about music, and to this day I still make things with the mind that he's going to listen to them, even though, I don't know if he is or not. I've had a lot of folks pass away that were close to me—more than most. It's not a callousness, but I found a way to accept that these people are still part of my life and always will be. It took a while to get that. Enough people keep dying, you finally start to figure out a way to deal with it—and that's my way of dealing with it, whether it's a family member or somebody musically close to me or important in my life. And Vic was definitely extremely important. I made music so that we could have a conversation—that's really why I did it, so we'd have some kind of ground to stand upon. I knew that he'd be straight with his assessment of what I did, and I tried to do the same for him.

I will say, I do know that Jake absolutely knows Vic's work pretty damn well, and I think it hit him the same way asit hit me, you, and a lot of people. I hate to say something like, "It's a shame, he's not still making music" and stuff like that. I'm just happy for what he did make. To me, that's great that we at least have that. The fact that he even made that first record and was able to get out of bumming around Athens and singing at parties—because I still think he's one of the greatest writers that I know. In my research of all the great writers that I could think of, he certainly was one of them—but he was maybe one of the harder dives I had to dig into, because I still struggle with some of his material, even though it pops into my head all the time. I go, "Man, I've got to find that song."

But I think his influence on these younger writers is definitely happening. You know, I don't know what the deal was at the time he was alive, why there wasn't more recognition of him as a great songwriter. I don't know if that would've ever changed or not. I mean, there was a lot of shooting-yourself-in-the-foot shit going on. It's so fucking complicated. It's just hard.