Lambchop came to Merge Records the way a lot of the Triangle-based label's roster did, by personal connections.
In the early 1990s, a college friend of Merge co-owner Mac McCaughan told him about this peculiar country band from Nashville that he was playing in. Frontman Kurt Wagner's subdued deadpan voice brought the Disney character Jiminy Cricket to mind, espousing surreal epigrams backed up by spectral, otherworldly country music.
"It sounded totally strange," McCaughan recalls. "But he started sending tapes, and it was actually really cool. We signed them, and Kurt and I have become close over the years - they played at my wedding. Kurt is a painter who became a musician, and he's a true artist in every sense of the word. He's not making records to be popular, he's just making art and if people like it, they like it. It just happens that the art he makes is really amazing."
True enough. Though nowhere near one of Merge's top sellers, Lambchop is one of the label's linchpins - by acclamation, the group pretty much stole the show at Merge's 20-year anniversary show back in July, a performance so extraordinary that it's being released soon as a live album ("Lambchop - Live at XX Merge").
The group returns to the Triangle tonight for a performance with Alejandro Escovedo at Duke University's Reynolds Industries Theater in Durham.
Lambchop's latest album "OH (ohio)" is another oddball masterpiece, pairing subdued, steady rolling arrangements with Wagner's cryptic observations. The highlight is "National Talk Like a Pirate Day," a wordy six-minute ramble full of images of existential crisis, pirates and people in pajamas clutching record players. Somehow, it all hangs together.
"That was an instance where I let things that were happening while I was working on a song enter into it and take it somewhere else," Wagner says by phone from his home in Nashville. "My wife called to remind me it was 'Talk Like a Pirate Day.' So after I hung up, I worked that right on into the song. Then I looked at a picture of my wife as a kid, wearing pajamas and holding a record player, and I started describing that image of her as a small child as part of the song. It grew from there."
If that sounds like a very painterly way to compose, Wagner comes by the urge honestly. Wagner started out as a painter before putting it aside to pursue music. But he recently started painting again.
"I gave it up in 2000," Wagner says. "Stuff got to be so distracting, and I'd find myself looking at the same painting for months with nothing happening. Maybe I had to stop for a while to be ready to get back to it. But I got back to painting about a year ago, and I really enjoy it. It's a good thing for me. I'm painting right now, as a matter of fact. Working on a picture of LBJ with a bunch of tow-headed kids, a photo op from 1964."
One thing that won't be coming back, however, is the falsetto range of Wagner's voice. His high, keening falsetto used to be a trademark feature of Lambchop's early records, and a counterpoint to his usual singing voice. But no more.
"Oh, I smoked and aged myself out of the falsetto," he says with a laugh. "I never had a strong one to begin with, so my notion of doing it was greater than my ability. To me, it was the type of sound and feeling that I wanted for those songs at the time. Then as I was getting older, it became almost impossible to do anymore - and now it truly is. I just turned 51. But that's OK."
