Lambchop are no strangers to reinvention, but their new album Flotus – with traces of hip-hop and technological tricks – marks a truly different sound for the alt-country band

“I guess it did create a little bit of head-scratching,” chuckles Kurt Wagner, as he recalls playing his Lambchop band members the songs he’d written for their new album, Flotus.

Head-scratching is certainly one way of putting it. Those who’ve grown accustomed to Lambchop as a subtle and sometimes soulful alt-country outfit might have wondered if this was even the same band when they first encountered Flotus’s lead single, The Hustle, back in August: electronic rhythms, hypnotic drones and painterly instrumental flourishes are all incorporated over its 18, largely vocal-free, minutes. As late-stage career reinventions go, it was pretty out there.

It’s not that Lambchop were strangers to reinvention, or even the odd perverse decision – 1997’s Thriller saw them cover three songs from East River Pipe’s Poor Fricky album; 2002’s Is a Woman flirted with minimalist piano reggae – but this was something different, by far the boldest statement the band had ever put out. And the rest of Flotus, it turns out, is no less interesting: it features elements of glitch (Directions to the Can), lounge music (Old Masters) and spliced vocal fragments (Relatives #2). The whole thing is swathed in heavy vocal processing, drawing parallels with Bon Iver’s new record 22, A Million and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak. Put simply … what the hell happened, Kurt?

He laughs. “Well, the initial plan was to make a record that maybe my wife would like. The music she listens to on her phone is often commercial pop, commercial hip-hop – she’s a big Beyoncé fan. I thought, ‘I would love to be in her playlist,’ to pop up on her phone. That was a big motivation.”



Wagner was aware he’d been absorbing such music for decades – sometimes through the television or in shops, but most often while sitting out on his porch having a cigarette and listening to the songs his neighbours were playing. Often it would overlap with the sounds of their domestic lives: parties, conversations, arguments, entwining the two together in Wagner’s mind as a soundtrack to everyday existence. He began to notice the link between country and hip-hop – “they’re both folkorish forms of music, if you think about it” – but trying to combine the two was harder than he anticipated.

“My first attempts were pretty hamfisted,” he admits. “I hadn’t realised the technological side of it.”

And so, aged 57, Wagner decided to rip it up and start again. He ditched the Pro Tools software he’d used for years, taught himself how to use Ableton Live and began studying recent albums by Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West. He soon realised that these artists were making creative leaps that had not, in his opinion, been seen in pop since the 60s.



“They’ve incorporated all the things that are now available to us technologically, and are just having their way with it creatively,” he marvels. “They’re going beyond traditional ways of making and producing records that I, as a guy who’s been making records a long time, have grown accustomed to. They’ve moved beyond what we would traditionally think of as hip-hop into a form that is ... boundless. They’re the lighthouse that people are heading to now as far as how they’re producing sound. It’s extremely sophisticated.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kurt Wagner of Lambchop performs at the Big Chill festival in 2006 Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Wagner, who cites David Bowie’s Blackstar as another record that shares this sense of creative abandonment, came to realise that technology had developed to the point where anything an artist could envisage was possible to recreate on record.

“And you can do it in a way that doesn’t cost a million dollars,” he adds. “To be able to just reach out into the void and come up with something is accessible even to someone of my meagre means. There are no boundaries. Your mind is your outer limit.”



One of Wagner’s eureka moments on this personal voyage of discovery came when he went to see Shabazz Palaces perform at Nashville’s Third Man Records store. He was intrigued by a small box they were using on-stage to generate a myriad of sounds.



“I thought, ‘What is this thing?’” he says, adding some dramatic suspicion to his voice. Further investigation revealed that it was a TC-Helicon VoiceLive 2, a tool invented to help singer-songwriters perform solo that just so happened to be packed with all kinds of inventive sonic tricks.



“You can simply turn your voice into an instrument with it,” he says. “For example, you could turn it into an organ and create songs and chord structures virtually just with your voice. That freed me up from my own limitations as a guitarist, because now I could process things in a way I would never have come up with on my own.”



As a Nashville musician who knew of Auto-Tune primarily as a device that helped mediocre singers cover up their mistakes (“It was used in the country music industry for quite a while before the cat got out of the bag”), using voice processing on his own records required a mental leap: at one time Wagner had regarded it as the antithesis to the warmth and humanity that he aimed to pour into Lambchop records. But playing around with the voicebox made him realise that it could be a creative instrument in its own right. “It screws things up and does unpredictable things, and I think that in itself is a very human trait,” he reasons. “These things would occur … and I had no idea of how they would happen! But I liked it!”



He liked it, but do others? Will Lambchop’s fans approve? And what about his wife? If you read the press release Wagner wrote to promote Flotus, you’re left a little disheartened. “It turns out she’s not impressed,” he writes. “She prefers the sound of my voice as it is and has been ... turns out she loves me for who I am. God, I’m such a dumbass.”



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His wife’s approval matters, not just because Wagner set out to impress her with this project, but because of how central she is to the album’s overriding theme of support. When I last spoke to Wagner, in 2008, he told me how she made podcasts for a liberal college radio show. Her working life seems to have changed dramatically since then – she is now the chair of the Democratic party in Tennessee. It means the title of the record has a multitude of meanings: FLOTUS, of course, stands for First Lady of the United States, a directly political reference to their current situation. But in this case, it also stands for For Love Often Turns Us Still, the full title of the record. The supporting role partners play in a relationship is referenced by both readings, and certainly Wagner has had to adapt his own life in order to support his wife as her career progressed.

“My awareness certainly had to increase!” he says with another big laugh. “In order for me to hang in those situations, I had to become more aware of what’s going on politically in our state, our country and our world. But that’s part of being married, you know, to try to understand and embrace and support the person you’re married to ... and my role in our lives now is very much a supportive one, particularly because of the intensity of her job.”



I suggest that most of the musicians I’ve met seemed better at requiring support from their partners than giving it.



“Well, what’s interesting is the ones I know that have stayed married over the course of time ... it’s one of the key things, you have to step outside of yourself and get over yourself a little bit – to realise that you’re in a relationship and that it goes both ways. I think that’s crucial to a long-term relationship, because people’s lives do change and evolve and you have to roll with it as the years go by.”



Was Wagner struck by some of the recent speeches Michelle Obama made on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton?

“Oh definitely. She’s remarkable, and one of the true bright moments of what is happening currently. But the general idea is that Flotus is a supportive title. You’re supportive of someone else. What’s curious now is that this can be also flipped into situations where I become Flotus or Bill [Clinton] becomes Flotus ... it’s not so much gender specific any more, which is interesting.”



A title loaded with different levels of meaning is nothing new for Lambchop, and in a strange way much of Flotus itself is nothing new either. What’s so impressive about the record is not simply that Wagner incorporated so many new creative processes into his work, but that he did so without disrupting what makes the band so special. Their gentle melodic twists and heartfelt sentiments remain.



Wagner believes fans of the band “seem to be digging” the two songs that have been posted online so far – The Hustle was followed by another teaser track NIV. And it turns out that, since writing his press release, even his wife is realising its charms: “She’s coming round, she likes some of it,” he says.

But what of his neighbours of two decades, whose years of playing hip-hop had filtered through Wagner’s head and sparked off the project to begin with?



“Well that was also one of my hopes, that I’d be able to get their opinion on it. Unfortunately, during the course of turning the record around, at about 13 to 14 months, they moved house.”



Gentrification has become a real problem in Nashville, he says, and they had to relocate further out of town. He hopes to bump into them, though. When he does, what will they make of Flotus?



“Oh, I think they’d laugh pretty hard. And then hopefully give it some sort of approval.”

