Endlich ist es soweit: Nach vier Jahren veröffentlichen LAMBCHOP am 24. Februar 2012 ihr elftes Album, es heißt "Mr. M" (City Slang). Es sollte ursprünglich Mr. Met heißen, aber die Anwälte der amerikanischen Baseball Major League hatten damit Probleme. Denn Mr. Met heißt auch das Maskottchen der New York Mets (lustigerweise sind sowohl Kurt Wagner als auch viele seiner Freunde, Ira Kaplan z.B., ergebene Fans der Mets). Ein Schuß, der nach hinten losging. Kurzzeitig sollte das Album daraufhin den Titel “Major League Bummer” erhalten.
Lambchop's Mastermind Kurt Wagner - laut FAZ gibt es "kaum einen gewiefteren Komponisten in der Popmusik als Kurt Wagner aus Nashville", laut NZZ ist "Kurt Wagner einer der besten lebenden Songwriter" - hatte nach dem Tod eines engen Freundes und musikalischen Kollaborateurs eine Auszeit genommen und sich auf seinen eigentlichen Beruf, den des Malers, konzentriert; es entstand eine Serie kleiner Porträts unter dem Titel "Beautillion Millitaire 2000" - eines dieser Bilder wird auch den Titel des neuen Lambchop-Albums "Mr. M" (und das Tourposter) zieren.
Bei der Arbeit an dieser Porträtserie stieß Kurt Wagner auf den Zusammenhang seiner Malerei mit der neuen Musik, die er im Kopf hatte - und sein langjähriger Produzent Mark Nevers schlug ein neues Soundkonzept vor, auf dessen Live-Realisierung man sehr gespannt sein darf: Eine Art "psycho-Sinatra-Sound", wie Wagner es nennt, mit offenen und dennoch komplexen Streicher- und anderen Sounds, die der Musik eine irrlichternde Präsenz verleihen. Und der Frank Sinatra-Verweis ist ja in Lambchops Welt kein gänzlich neuer:
"My Blue Wave wirkt nicht nur musikalisch wie eine brillante Fortsetzung von Frank Sinatras My Way“ (Christine Heise, TIP Berlin), oder: „...die Platte hätte eigentlich auch In The Wee Small Hours heißen können, aber dann wäre sie von Frank Sinatra. Auch so ein Frauenschwarm.“ (Michael Hess, Szene HH)
"Mr. M" ist das elfte Album von Lambchop, die bisher weltweit über eine Million CDs verkauft haben. Die Tournee zum neuen Album beginnt mit gleich zwei Konzertabenden in Berlin und führt in einige der größten und etabliertesten Konzertsäle Europas (Barbican London, Wiener Konzerthaus, DR Konzerthaus Kopenhagen), in spezielle Konzertsäle und Theater, aber auch in einige Clubs. Kurt Wagner und Lambchop lieben die Mischung verschiedener Konzertstile, und ihre Fans lieben Lambchop für ihre Vielseitigkeit auf allerhöchstem Qualitätsniveau.
Für uns ist das neue Lambchop Album eines ihrer Besten. Es wird seinen Platz im Triumvirat mit Is A Woman und Nixon einnehmen. Zum Glück ist Mr. M. aber auch ganz anders. So wie auch Nixon völlig anders als Is A Woman war. Aber das ist alles nur unsere Meinung und nicht so wichtig. Wichtiger sind die Fakten:
- Eingespielt mit Mark Nevers in Nashville. Zur Kernband Matt Swanson (bass), Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar), Ryan Norris (guitar, organ) und Scott Martin (drums, percussion) stießen Streicher aus London und Austin, TX. In der Live-Umsetzung wird es Gastmusiker geben, soviel kann schon verraten werden.
- Das Artwork dieser Platte besteht aus einem Teil einer Gemäldeserie von Kurt Wagner namens ‘Beautillion Militaire 2000’ , die Kurt Wagner kürzlich in einer Ausstellung in Nashville vorstellte.
- Mr. M ist das erste Lambchop-Album, auf dem Kurt Wagner das Wort “Love” in den Mund nimmt.
- Mr. M belebt eine alte Lambchop-Tradition wieder, indem es zwei Instrumentals enthält.
- Mr. M ist dem Andenken an Vic Chesnutt gewidmet, der am 25.12.2009 den Freitod wählte.
Das NEUE Video zu Lambchop´s "2B2" fängt die intimen Momente der zum größten Teil ausverkauften Europa Tour im Februar/März ein. Passend zur Premiere gibt es schon die ersten Daten der Zusatztour von Lambchop im Herbst.
“It just turned cold outside. What was warm is now less comforting. This is the world in which I write to you, just as it was back when I started to consider how – or even if – I could bring myself to make another record.
I’ve been doing this ‘job’ for a while, always with the same basic notion that I am sharing through songs – secretly, intimately – my ideas with my friends and loved ones. They were letters or postcards to those people I loved, respected and admired. Some were mentors, some touchstones, some critical advisers, others were teachers or likeminded doers. Do these friends know? Some do, some don’t. Vic Chesnutt did. He was the first to ‘get it’ and encouraged the correspondence, as it were. Through record after record, we’d send each other these coded insights or messages. It was how things were. It was our way, and no one needed to know but us. I mean, who would really care?
Vic’s loss came just as sudden and swift as the cold has set in, and went to the very core of my relationship with music. The idea of using it to communicate with my friends was called into question. I was at a point in my creative life where I was ready to come back around to the idea of painting again, and, by this sick coincidence, painting turned out to be the only thing I could do: a simple solitary act, as if I could pry life itself out of the action. But it happened that, through painting, suddenly the connection was made to music, and, in so doing, the pictures I was making began to have a relationship to the songs that I slowly began to write in conjunction with Vic. Or, rather, due to his absence. I didn’t set out to have them relate to the events in my life, but, in reality, how could they not?
As I worked, I was approached by Mark Nevers with the idea of making another Lambchop record. He had a concept of a sound and a method that worked with the tone of my writing. His idea was a kind of ‘psycho-Sinatra’ sound, one that involved the arranging of strings and other sounds in a more open and yet complex way. It was a studio creation, not a type of recording based on band performance, and this was a radical approach for us. He and I also discussed and shared Vic’s loss: we were all close, and Vic filled the air and the nights that passed. In the end we moved ahead: I felt Lambchop had one more good record in us, and this time I was going to do things as directly and true to my desires as possible. We were going to make the record Marky and I wanted to make, the way we saw fit, taking as long as it took. I was, in essence, ‘going for broke’, because I was broken and saw this as a last chance to get myself right. This time it was personal.
This is not an elegy or tribute to someone who was a friend and mentor. I’ve done that already, and it took its toll. Hopefully, instead, you can find a way to focus on the upside of such a true, soul-saving effort. This is a record of, and about, love and the healing, binding force that it represents. It’s the thing that becomes, more and more, the only thing worth living for as we move on through these years together, not alone. I’ve never been more grateful for the opportunity.” - Kurt Wagner, November 2011 -
Lambchop´s "Gone Tomorrow", ein Mini-Meisterwerk, das letztes Jahr im November in Nashville gedreht wurde.
Und HIER könnt ihr euch "Gone Tomorrow" kostenlos downloaden.
MR. M, TRACK BY TRACK by KURT WAGNER
1) If Not I’ll Just Die:
The body of this song was taken from the experience of trying to write a song while in a house full of my entire in-law family – 8 adults, 4 children – and also streaming the, at the time, new Antony and the Johnsons record. What occurred was a real time transcription of events, each line shifting from one quote or observation to the next. There was screaming, coughing, random bursts of conversation, Antony singing, stuff blowing up on the TV. The chorus came later, as a reflection about passing on, tagged with a musical reference to the last line from the Carpenters’ song, ‘Close To You’. Naturally this became the title of the song: ‘If Not I’ll Just Die’.
2) 2B2:
After Vic’s death on Christmas Day, 2009, I – for whatever reason – couldn’t bear to take down our outdoor holiday lights. It felt like some sort of breakthrough when, months later, I finally did. In a way it marked the beginning of my starting to deal with the issues I’d been overwhelmed by. The idea behind it focuses on the connections we have to each other as loved ones, and through that a way to relate to it all, a way to get through. It’s best to let each other be who they are, and that understanding and acceptance of each other holds us close and yet allows us to be two. What was written was a chronicle of events of that evening’s breakthrough: high and hungry and tired, walking past the television with some BBC film on, the dogs barking at nothing at all, talking on the phone to a friend while we were both cooking chickpeas.
3) Gone Tomorrow:
I wrote this song in my painting studio, a corner of a recording studio behind the local baseball stadium. There’s an area of woodland nearby that was being removed in order to make way for road expansion and redirection, but at one time it had been a sanctuary for homeless transients, and I’d see them from time to time. This song was an attempt to write something from their perspective, observing their sense of loss and, I suppose, mirroring my own.
4) Mr. Met:
This album was originally called Mr. Met, but, due to the Major League Baseball Association’s refusal let us use this title, we changed it to Mr. M. The song has nothing to do with baseball, or indeed the mascot for the team known as Mr. Met. It was more about the word as a verb, the past tense for ‘meet’, a suggestion of past acquaintance. It’s a straightforward recounting of my feelings of loss and love at the time.
5) Gar:
I had intended to add words to this, but during the course of things Mark created a beautiful and strange instrumental approach and it stuck. I look at it as a breather, relief from the sound of my voice and a chance to focus on the musicality of this record. It was originally titled ‘Wild Harpeth Gar’ after a bottom feeding fish found in the region of Middle TN, but Gar is also a term used back when I did wood floors to describe a scarring of a wood surface.
6) Nice Without Mercy:
This is an adaptation of a text I wrote for a photograph by visual artist Richard Saxton as part of an as-yet unpublished book of such collaborations. Somehow the picture’s outdoor quality moved me to seek a way to connect it with the memories of going to Vic's funeral in Athens, GA.: the small, country church-like building set in the woods, and, as the sun was setting, the relief of being outside of this crowded structure. Little Jimmy Dickens, who I believe had sung ‘I Saw The Light’, was a nickname I had for Vic at one time.
7) Buttons:
This is the oldest song in the collection and has been recorded at least four times before now. It was written about an experience I had involving a relatively tragic local character in the Nashville underground music scene. For years I never knew his name and referred to him as “the button eyed boy”. It’s about how people can change and about his life as I saw it up to when we finally “met”, when I realized that many of my ideas about him were unfounded, as I suppose he might have found out with me.
8) The Good Life (is wasted):
I wrote this the day Charlie Louvin died. I was watching a lot of old Louvin Brothers Youtube clips, and I discovered how simple and cool their older songs were to play. I started writing one based on that discovery. It’s perhaps my first attempt at a straight-ahead country song. It was originally meant to be a KORT song, but its content obviously fit the mood of this record.
9) Kind Of:
As I recall, this was written on a morning after a quasi ‘lost weekend’ of moderate substance abuse at a time when my wife was out of town, as was a good friend and band mate. I was trying to address an estrangement with him that was going on at the time, and his ability to be consistently less than decisive. I was no doubt looking for some version of redemption through love as well. This is another example of a postcard or message to a friend.
10) Betty’s Overture:
Another break in the vocal action of what we do, this song was first performed as an introductory instrumental to our set at a very small bar in Nashville called Betty’s. It was our place to just show up and play from time to time without much, or any, ado. The irony is that the woman who booked us at the bar is no longer there and, with her departure, our appearances there are now over.
11) Never My Love:
Simply my attempt at writing a ‘love’ song. For years I maintained I’d never use the word “love” or be so direct as to write a love song using the word. Never say never, right? Maybe it was time to get over it, to get over it all. It feels pretty good.
I’ve been doing this for a while, always with the same basic notion that I am sharing through songs – secretly, intimately – my ideas with my friends and loved ones.
Kurt Wagner November 2011
It starts with some casual cursing yet the last word is ‘love’. It began when singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Wagner turned away from music and picked up his brushes to paint his way out of a funk that followed the premature death of friend Vic Chesnutt, who the band backed on 1998’s The Salesman and Bernadette. And though the sprawling multi-headed quiet juggernaut that is Lambchop most often treasure performance over artifice, their eleventh album is very much a studio creation.
Mr M started in a painter’s studio in fact. Wagner explains. “As I worked, I was approached by Mark Nevers (former full time band member & producer for the likes of Andrew Bird and Will Oldham) with the idea of making another Lambchop record. He had a concept of a sound and a method that worked with the tone of my writing. His idea was a kind of ‘psycha-Sinatra’ sound, one that involved the arranging of strings and other sounds in a more open and yet complex way. It was a studio creation, not a type of recording based on band performance, and this was a radical approach for us. I felt Lambchop had one more good record in us, and this time I was going to do things as directly and true to my desires as possible.”
The resulting album was recorded at Nevers’s Nashville Beech House studio cum bungalow and is dedicated to Chesnutt. Working with the usual core of musicians- Scott Martin (drums), Matt Swanson (bass), Ryan Norris (guitar, organ), Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar) and guests include original co-founder Jonathan Marx, delightful Cortney Tidwell (who shared vocals on 2010’s KORT project) and fiddler Billy Contreras (who has worked with all from Charlie Louvin to Laura Cantrell) - and with spectacular string arrangements shared between Peter Stopshinski and Mason Neely, it stretches out sonically as promised. (Incidentally the paintings, thickly layered black and white portraits forming a series called Beautillion Millitaire 2000, feature on the album sleeve and throughout the full artwork).
The amazing extended coda of ‘Gone Tomorrow’ lives up to Nevers’s original concept, deep and touching and genuinely unclassifiable. ‘The Good Life (Is Wasted)’ is Wagner’s rare attempt at a straight-ahead country song, inspired by trawling through YouTube clips of the Louvin Brothers after the death of Charlie Louvin, a Nashville fixture and another of Nevers’s clients. Even such simplicity comes with a few curveballs- Wagner alternatively calls it ‘The Good (Life Is Wasted)’ and the occasional punctuating powerchords are swathed in whooshing flange that might have graced an eighties pop-goth single.
So normal for Lambchop then, wild juxtapositions and lush arrangements. But there is heart in this music. “We were going to make the record Marky and I wanted to make, the way we saw fit, taking as long as it took. I was, in essence, ‘going for broke’, because I was broken and saw this as a last chance to get myself right. This time it was personal.” And Kurt Wagner’s concept of the personal resonates.
From its opening line- “Took the Christmas lights off the front porch, it felt like February 31st”- ‘2B2’ deals with the strangeness of the commonplace, and as we age that includes the death of a friend. When he double tracks the line ‘It was good to talk to you while we’re cooking, sounds like we’re making the same thing’, it adds a touch of wonder to this reassuring everyday occurrence. Wagner does the small surprise as well as any songwriter.
‘Mr Met’ is the real title track, though as mediocre baseball team the New York Mets have a mascot with that name, the album title was changed to avoid legal complications. ‘Met’ here isn’t a sports or even an urban reference, but the past participle of ‘to meet’. With its long, purely classical string introduction and the eerie backing vocals from Cortney Tidwell, this stately, deliberate song, in Wagner’s words ‘a straightforward recounting of my feelings of love and loss’, stands out.
The gentle heartbreaker ‘Nice Without Mercy’, its words originally a caption to an artist friend’s photograph until their secondary relevance was noted, specifically evokes Chesnutt’s rural funeral. When Wagner’s voice catches on the words ‘Little Jimmy Dickens’, an occasional nickname he applied to his friend, the effect is way beyond affectation. He makes no great claims for his grief, accepting that loved ones are regularly lost. But acceptance doesn’t remove the sadness. “This is not an elegy or tribute to someone who was a friend and mentor. I’ve done that already, and it took its toll” he says.
So this is not simply a memorial record. The lovely, wordless ‘Gar’, its title referring either to a bottom feeding fish or a scar in woodgrain, is appropriately hard to pin down. ‘Betty’s Overture’, the other instrumental, is dedicated to a friendly promoter who of late provided a low key venue for Lambchop to develop this work. It sounds like a Nashville take on a spy movie theme. The friend is no longer employed at said venue.
‘Buttons’ faces up to the writer’s predilection for creating entirely imagined life stories for acquaintances and realising that the process works both ways. The lesson is that even imagined characters can change, or maybe judge not lest ye be judged. The Bacharach-quoting ‘If Not I’ll Just Die’ simply describes the chaos around him as a houseful of family conspires to frustrate Wagner’s attempts to compose. Again Wagner’s voice is doubled-up on the concluding ‘Never My Love’, giving him the confidence to use a four-letter word that has never previously appeared in his work.
Yet no Lambchop record has ever been lacking in love, and Mr M is no exception. “This is a record of, and about, love and the healing, binding force that it represents. It’s the thing that becomes, more and more, the only thing worth living for as we move on through these years together, not alone.”
Tracklist –
1. If Not I'll Just Die 2. 2B2 3. Gone Tomorrow 4. Mr. Met 5. Gar 6. Nice Without Mercy 7. Buttons 8. The Good Life (is wasted) 9. Kind Of 10. Betty's Overture 11. Never My Love
Praise for OH (ohio) –
“To know these Nashville outsiders is to know music as deeply pensive and tender art”
5/5 Stool Pigeon
“His best and most defined set of songs since the band’s apotheosis, Nixon”
‘Albums of the Year’ Uncut
“A celebration of human solidarity” 4/5 Mojo
“Lovely stuff” Word
“Deeply poignant” Esquire
“By the seventh listen, you’ll treasure it forever” 4/5 The Sun
“He’s certainly rediscovered his talent’s warmly wry levity” 4/5 The Independent
“Another balmy night of the soul” 4/5 Time Out
“OH (ohio) sits in Lambchop’s always impressive canon comfortably, perfectly balanced and meticulously thought out” 4/5 Record Collector
“Wagner still has plenty of painful love stories to unfurl against Lambchop’s singular mix of country and soul” Observer
