Are we there yet? Have we reached post-pandemic karma?
Clearly not in literal terms, but for Kurt Wagner – he who is now and has always been the ever evolving, impossible-to-define Lambchop – there may unwittingly be an expiration date on the music which the biggest global crisis in a century has spawned.
Speaking in the run-up to the release of the collective’s sixteenth record, the grizzled 61-year-old questioned the longevity of material written inside this maze of confused feelings, doubting himself whether some of it will be able in hindsight to escape its own gravity.
Ever the contrarian, and following a kind of eat-your-own-dog-food logic, Showtunes explores the reverse idea of sound as timelessness via the themes, if not the format, of how the expanded idea of theatre and performance can lend new aspects to music itself.
Following a string of albums deconstructing Lambchop’s sound, Kurt Wagner continues to reinvent his band, this time using MIDI-assisted piano melodies to write love songs to music itself.
Lambchop share The Last Benedict from Showtunes
Lambchop share The Last Benedict from Showtunes
Lambchop will put Showtunes out on May 21st.
“At the breakfast buffet table in a hotel during the Pickathon Festival, I was ‘lucky’ enough to get the last Eggs Benedict of the service,” Kurt Wagner says. “One sad egg.”
“Later, I caught the final scene in Giant, the one after the brawl in the diner where a battered but bemused Rock Hudson looks across the table at his grandson and says something akin to ‘the last Benedict’. Much later, I was sitting on my back porch and wrote this song.”