Punching the Clown [CD]

To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown - the seventeenth album by beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop, out August 21, 2026 on Merge Records and City Slang - began as a ghost hunt. After hearing a song on the radio while driving one night - "a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices" - he went looking for it and failed. In his pursuit, he discovered "lined-out singing, " a form of acapella call-and-response gospel singing that began in Scotland in the 1800s and became a root of American gospel and country music when Scottish immigrants settled in Appalachia. The song, typically a hymn, is led by a clerk, who begins the verse alone before a choir swells up to accompany them on the rest of the line. Lined-out singing was born out of necessity - not every member of a given congregation could read, so the clerk's voice spurred the choir's memory of what came next in the hymn - but it's effect is profound: a haunting, elegiac means of interpretation in which you can hear not only the words and what they mean, but what those words meant to each person singing them. a spontaneous call and response type of acapella singing led by a clerk with a chorus of singers revealing the raw beauty and power of the human voice with it's unique varieties it's unadorned simplicity gave weight to the words as they were sung. i wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music.Wagner says that doing so required him to become a better songwriter. The process was a crucible. Working again with guitarist Andrew Broder, Wagner went back to writing songs the way he did when he started out, with guitar and voice, studying songs and songwriters, "allowing their madness, pain, and truth to become mine." Of the dozens of songs Wagner and Broder wrote, 30 were considered, and 12 became Punching the Clown. The voice lining out those songs, unmistakably, is Wagner's. Responding to his call: Broder (guitar), Justin Vernon (banjo), an Eau Claire-based choir put together by Blake Morgan, The Bible producer Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs), and engineer Mark Nevers (Silver Jews, Bill Callahan, Bonnie "Prince" Billy), recording and mixing his first Lambchop album since 2012's Mr. M. However the notion of Wagner needing to become a "better" songwriter strikes longtime Lambchop fans, his striving has yielded an album of disarming humanity. It's graceful, generous, sometimes wry and sometimes heartbreaking, unblinkingly idiosyncratic yet precise as cut glass. How else can one describe Punching the Clown, beyond Wagner's own exegesis? It's the darndest thing.