By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, January 2007
(Sidebar to Yo La Tengo feature)
“James from Yo La Tengo says hello.”
“Oh, good! Can’t wait to see him,” replies Kurt Wagner, the gentle baritone behind Nashville’s most enduring and endearing supergroup, Lambchop. “We’re kind of old friends, you know. Usually, they (Yo La Tengo) come to Nashville and we just go down the street and play with them. But, in this case, they figured, ‘Knoxville, it’s close. Let’s see what happens.’ We were, of course, glad to do it.”
Wagner is referring to his band’s upcoming gig in Knoxville as Yo La Tengo’s honorary opening act. As of now, it’s the only show on the Lambchop schedule for 2007. The question is, how many of the group’s dozen or so members will be making the cross-state trip?
“Yet to be determined,” says Wagner. “But the numbers seem to be swelling. Originally, it was going to be seven of us, but I think we’ll have a few more than that, just because it’s close and everybody wants to go and see Yo La Tengo play.”
Wagner and company spent much of last year touring the globe in support of their ninth studio album, Damaged—a complex collection of insight and instrumentation that successfully made the band even harder to describe, if perhaps a little easier to understand.
“That’s an interesting observation,” Wagner chuckles. “I still have trouble describing us. I’ve never really been very good at it. But it’s nice to know that we’ve become a little bit more, um, legible.”
Of course, everything is relative. After fifteen years, Lambchop’s tag resistant blend of Stax soul, punk gall, and classic country—not to mention Wagner’s spoken-word surrealism— is still a bit much for the Music City establishment to fully comprehend. Then again, the humble, 43 year-old Wagner never did have any interest in playing the role of the Nashville Star.
“There are a lot of guys in Nashville who hide behind that idea of being a musician,” he says. “They take on a persona or act weird for weird’s sake. I don’t want to be like that. I mean, my songs are weird enough. I’m a pretty normal guy.”
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