Have I Got Ewes For You

Even before the mould was cold, Gram Parsons disowned country-rock, a genre he is widely credited or discredited with founding. As acts like The Eagles and Poco used the Waycross kid s map to locate gold in them there hills, he himself grew disgusted at what they d done to his sound, turning it into a plastic dry-fuck , sucking all the soul, the gospel and the funk out of it.

One imagines Gram would ve had a lot of time for Lambchop. He may have been proud of bandleader Kurt Wagner s audacity: the string charts seemingly grafted from Van s most swooning waltzes; the voice, like Martin Stephenson singing Lee Hazelwood; the 17 piece band s lush sound, a sort of spacey lounge country which has more to do with High Llamas or Mercury Rev than Wilco. So how on earth did Lambchop get lumped in with the No Depression/New Country posse?
To me, it was a sort of simplistic overall way of getting out in a sentence what we might be about, Wagner reckons.
There s a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson s Boogie Nights where a denim-wearing black hi-fi dealer blows a sale, off-putting the customer by playing him a blast of corny truckstop rock on the shop s state of the art stereo equipment. Annoyed, disgusted and perplexed by his employee s cross-racial love of redneck honky-tonk music, his boss demands, What kind of brother are you anyway?
Kurt Wagner could ve written that scene in reverse. Sure, his songs are based aroubd heartbroken vocals and weeping pedal steels, but there are also great Curtis Mayfield/Al Green falsettos set against prime Isaac Hayes hot buttered soul.
I think that s why people, at least in Nashville, scratch their heads at what we do, y know? Kurt muses. Or when they finally do hear what we re doing after reading whatever misinformation they ve read, they re just pretty perplexed, maybe even disappointed. I dunno, that s their problem!
But then, there s a Nashville noir we rarely hear about, save for post-rehab horror stories of Steve Earle at his most destitute, getting a job guarding a crack house in the black area of town as a means of obtaining free drugs.
Yeah, I think there s kind of that dark side in general to a lot of places in the south, Wagner says. It goes for the northern cities as well, but the south is not quite as romanticized as people may think it is, it s not all what you ve read about in a Cormac McCarthy novel or something. There s definitely a contemporary side of Nashville that s very urban, kinda scary.
Cool enough. But how does the title of the band s latest album Nixon figure into all this? Is it some kind of comment on the conservatism and corruption at the heart of the country music industry?
This friend of mine makes these paintings, Kurt explains, and I loved them and I thought it would be great to use one for a record cover. We hadn t had a title for the record yet because I knew we would use a slogan from one of these paintings. He read me off six or seven titles and when he got to Nixon it just felt right, and from then I did quite a bit of post-rationalisation in order to sort of get it right in my mind.
It just felt right as opposed to some of his other titles, like Goofy Western 2000, I remember that was one, but Nixon begged as many questions as it did answers, it s evocative. From my point of view, the first thing that came to mind was a lot of the music that was going on around that period of time, great music, and it sort of reflected what we were into when we were making the record. And I also thought about it in the context of there s some kids that have no idea and could give a shit who Nixon was, and that s legitimate as well.

The full 17-piece Lambchop line-up plays the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Sunday, September 24. Nixon is out now on City Slang.