Lambchop presents new album in Botanique

There are no certainties in life anymore: on FLOTUS, Kurt Wagner puts his deep baritone through a vocoder, anchors his lazy, hip-hop-inspired grooves, and makes irritating telesales calls a rewarding topic of conversation.

"I feel fortunate that my band is not part of a style," Lambchop's frontman tells us. He has briefly swapped his familiar veranda in Tennessee for a terrasse in Brussels. "When you get labelled in a certain way, it reduces your freedom to do things." This is intended to be a dig at all the people who once called his Nashville collective alt-country or Americana.

But after listening to FLOTUS, on which the singer-songwriter and his musicians have made a musical sea change, his words suddenly take on a new meaning. Kurt Wagner will be sixty years old next year. The baseball cap will stay forever, but the music "has to stay exciting no matter what".

Lambchop have always been very good at incorporating noise and peripheral elements, but only now are you making real electronica with krautrock influences.
Kurt Wagner: Integrating my surroundings has indeed always been a priority, and that was always evident in the music. But the electronic sounds have been influencing me indirectly for twenty years.

So has technology suddenly become more important in your life?
Wagner: It was certainly the unifying factor. When I started experimenting with electronica, outside Lambchop as well, I discovered a whole arsenal of software programmes with which I could compose music in a totally different way than I had done before. But I had to find some way of bringing it into my world. And I had to figure out how to adapt my specific voice and lyrical style to the new textures.

Your mumbling has never sounded so much like a stream of consciousness.
Wagner: Yes, that somehow seemed like the best strategy. I was primarily inspired by what hip-hop artists do. Their rhymes have an effect because of the way they pronounce their words as a stream of consciousness. It is not the concrete meaning that holds everything together, but the rhymes. My job was to find a way of making that work for somebody who doesn't rap.

I'm not an MC, but a songwriter who can also adapt his voice. Things only got really interesting when I found a processor that I could use in real time. I gradually started looking for a balance between my personality and the technology. The record illustrates my steps in that process.

Lambchop being influenced by hip hoppers: for music lovers who heard your debut in the 1990s that might come as quite a surprise.
Wagner: Hip hop has not only become more important as a medium and an art form over the past few years, but it has also evolved. In a bizarre way, we've almost come full circle. The genre started with nothing but samples and they were later supplemented by vocal parts. Now people sometimes drop the beats and tend more towards ambient, and even rhyming isn't so important anymore.

Nick Cave's new album made me think of that evolution because he was always someone who used a lot of words: the beats are gone, as are the big drums, and they've been replaced by atmosphere and a powerful, emotional experience.

How did technology influence your lyrics, which have always been quite vague?
Wagner: I've always left enough space for the listener to provide their own interpretation, because I aim to connect much more on an emotional level than on an intellectual level. So rather than explicitly telling people what's going on, I hint at things. On FLOTUS I tried to obscure the technology by making everything sound very spontaneous. You can't easily put spontaneity and technology side by side. The way to make it more human is to screw it up, have fun with it, distort it…

In "JFK" you say: "I talk too much." Is that self-referential?
Wagner: Of course!

In "In Care Of: 8675309", the song with the most words, you talk about "lies in the walls of the house of cancer". What is that about?
Wagner: Letting the stanzas come thick and fast was the only way of making this intense song work. You can interpret "the house of cancer" both literally and figuratively. There was asbestos in the walls of some neighbours I used to have. So it was literally a cancer house. Figuratively, it refers to my personal situation and a close friend who battled the disease.

FLOTUS is an acronym of For Love Often Turns Us Still.
Wagner: It's true, right? In the long run, love is one of the few things that will continue to surprise you, if it's the real deal. It's autobiographical, since I was trying to make a record my wife would like. I've often written songs about our relationship, but now I thought it was time to create a record with that concept in mind.

Strangely, again, these "love songs" don't sound very conventional.
Wagner: I know, I totally screwed up. Actually I was trying to make something that was fairly conventional. And in a lot of ways it is, as far as technology and structures and the tools I'm using are concerned. But I just can't seem to figure out how to put the whole thing together the way normal people do. [Laughs]

In the title song you go: "they take and take and take". Who are you talking about?
Wagner: Haha. When I'm writing at home, I sometimes get interrupted by people calling me to sell stuff that you don't need. And then I tend to include references in my next line. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but somehow, at the same time, it is part of the experience of writing, so it becomes legitimate.

For a moment, you slip into real time, and then you're going back to whatever the subject is. It's a strange device for writers to use, but I think novelists do that a lot. Again, I'm not so concerned about making linear sense. I want to engage listeners in coming up with ideas of their own.

> Lambchop. 11/02, 19.30, Botanique. Sint-Joost-ten-Node