Punching the Clown Lambchop

• 1 Just West of Nicollet 05:37
• 2 A Doctor in the House 03:09
• 3 Weakened 05:37
• 4 Stella 03:33
• 5 Punching the Clown 03:13
• 6 White People 02:53
• 7 The New World Wave 05:07
• 8 Andrew Jackson Asshat 05:20
• 9 Afterburner 02:52
• 10 Cigar 02:47
• 11 To Do 02:57
• 12 No Chicago 04:39
• Total Runtime 47:44

Info for Punching the Clown

On August 21, the beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop returns with their seventeenth album "Punching the Clown." Produced by Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs) with songs by Lambchop's principal Kurt Wagner and member Andrew Broder, "Punching the Clown" was tracked over three days at April Base, the studio of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, and features Vernon on banjo as well as a six-part choir throughout.

To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, "Punching the Clown" 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 its 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.

From the desk of Kurt Wagner: "...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 its unique varieties its unadorned simplicity gave weight to the words as they were sung. I wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music."

Andrew Broder, guitar
Kurt Wagner, vocal
Justin Vernon, banjo
London Choir
Eau Claire Vocal Sextet
Blake Morgan, choir director and arranger
Randall Throckmorton, vocals
Isaac Levy, bass (track 5)
Cole Davis, bass (track 4)
Tanner Anderson, hurdy gurdy (tracks 1, 7)
LA Buckner, castanets (track 3)

Recorded and Mixed by Mark Nevers at April Base August 25-27, 2025; London November 17, 2025; Pawley’s Island December 15,16 2025
Produced by RYAN OLSON

Lambchop
The shift is so subtle and unassuming, you may never notice it happens. But 42 minutes into Lambchop’s fourteenth studio album—the disarming but intimate confessional called This (is what I wanted to tell you)—Kurt Wagner steps forward, his voice newly unadorned. With the Auto-Tune gild of recent Lambchop records momentarily leached away, his voice is as open and honest as the acoustic guitar and lonesome harmonica that traipse beneath it. The feelings practically pour between the cracks of his stunning baritone, raw for the first time in years. “If I gave you a hundred dollars to record just three words/I could make the perfect song,” he sings, the vulnerability of both voice and verse becoming an emotional revelation as he curls aspirationally around that final phrase. The finale of This, “Flower” is a moment of hope wrought from a static state of quiet hell, a little request for a vow of love before we all cry or drink ourselves to death. This is what he wanted to tell you, plain and simple and pure.

You can understand why Wagner needs a little cover during the first seven songs of This. (By the way, it’s the fourteenth Lambchop album because, like all the other tallest buildings in the world, Lambchop skips No. 13.) In tone poems that link poignant snapshots of everyday scenes with koan-like reflections about what it takes and means to stay alive in these modern times, Wagner limns a world that seems to be falling apart. During scene-framing opener “The New Isn’t So You Anymore,” he sorts through the newspaper only to be disappointed in the news and its delivery; days and debates get him in trouble he worries he cannot undo. Wagner reckons with a reality of gentle but relentless senescence and entropy as the drums simmer and pianos refract during “The Lasting Last of You.” In a quivering falsetto over muted soul sparkle, he compromises with the cold expectations and consistent letdown of our era for “The December-ish You.”

Inside these gorgeous and haunted numbers, the seasons and the lights and the days change, but the people remain the same. The album’s tiny moment of genuine joy (“I’m in a Mexican restaurant bar/Watching surfing/And it’s amazing,” he sings with an audible grin) emerges from a web of warped synthesizer signals and discordant horns, only to slip right back in. This (is what I wanted to tell you) fully documents the feeling of watching things fall apart, helplessly wondering where it all went wrong.

Not so long ago, Lambchop had a famously sprawling line-up, toting a dozen or so members around the world and into the studio to document elliptical country-soul mutations. But in recent years, the band has become a more personal vehicle for Wagner. Anchored by him and framed by bassist Matt Swanson and Wagner’s incorrigibly grinning foil, the pianist Tony Crow, the Lambchop of this decade has become more pliant and adaptable, opening itself to unexpected collaborators that give Wagner’s thoughts and feelings the shape they need for each new album. That was the idea for 2012’s engrossing Mr. M and 2016’s staggering (and tragically timed, we should say here) FLOTUS, and it remains the approach for This (is what I wanted to tell you).

In the summer of 2017, Wagner left Nashville and crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into North Carolina, where he attended the 50th birthday party of longtime friend and Merge co-founder Mac McCaughan. That night, Wagner re-met Mac’s younger brother, Matt McCaughan, who has spent the last decade drumming for the likes of Bon Iver and Hiss Golden Messenger. McCaughan told Wagner he had been adventuring inside the world of rack-mounted analogue synthesizers and asked if Wagner might send some vocals to which he could compose.

They became instant musical pen pals, with Wagner sending him a cappella takes of new song ideas and McCaughan dispatching long-form synthesizer pieces for inspiration. McCaughan eventually headed to Nashville, where, together, they put a band behind the songs, using pedal steel and piano and the harmonica of Nashville legend Charlie McCoy to color in the spaces of these black-and-white sketches. That unexpected human connection—that is, rekindling an old friendship to make music in a way you never imagined—is a happy answer to the worries of This (is what I wanted to tell you), an album whose honesty pulls on your heart with the weight of absolute empathy. Stunning, beautiful, and surprising, This (is what I wanted to tell you) is a record you just need to hear.

This album contains no booklet.