On ‘A Major Minor Drag’, an elegiac highlight from Lambchop’s 2022 album The Bible, Kurt Wagner sang, “I’m at war now with the obvious.” The line references a famous quote by the photographer William Eggleston that seemed to encapsulate his decades-long practice, but Wagner’s recontextualization adds a weighted now, as if, three decades into the band’s career, he’s only just starting to warp the stranglehold of reality. Perhaps it was more pronounced than ever on that record, a cold refraction of day-to-day heartache through electronic effects, vocal manipulation, and lyrical abstraction. A couple of years ago, Wagner heard a simple song on the radio – a banjo playing a single chord, accompanied by a few voices – that would calibrate his next album, Punching the Clown. In a way, it sounds like a radical reconfiguration of the band, the kind of record that seems to wipe the slate clean. Yet Wagner’s approach, his tendency to vanish into the ether, hasn’t changed, nor has his close circle of collaborators: there’s guitarist Andrew Broder co-writing, Mark Nevers recording and mixing, and Ryan Olson on production. Holding down the banjo is none other than Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who just so happened to be working with the instrument in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, some 800 miles north of Wagner’s hometown of Nashville.

And if the AutoTune of previous years scanned as little more than a buddy of his, you could say the same about the choirs accompanying him on the new record, two ensembles both helmed by Blake Morgan: one from Eau Claire with six voices, and one from London with eleven. Yet for all its apparent naturalism, Eggleston’s maxim still rings true, as Wagner and company still find subtle ways to lend the songs a touch of the surreal, disrupting the embrace of sincerity, and offsetting its obvious reverence with a bit of humour at an age where it seems reserved for other forms of entertainment rather than people. In the mundane yet magical process of stringing it all together, Lambchop make the struggle feel a little more than personal.

We caught up with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner to talk about the Punching the Clown film, artist relationships, his father’s apartment, and other inspirations behind his new album.

The 2009 mockumentary Punching the Clown

I only got to watch the first few minutes, where the protagonist is doing a radio session and realizes he has to censor the word “shit” in his song. 

When I suggested this as a topic and starting example, it serves several purposes. It addresses the title of the record, but we also made a video based upon the film. We ended up using that film and that opening sequence as sort of the model, and we asked Henry, the actor in it, if he would mind recreating that role in an interview. But instead of being Henry, he was me, so he plays me, but he’s actually Henry. And he went as far as dyeing his hair and getting into shape so that he appeared very much like he did in the film, which, I didn’t ask for that, but he took it pretty seriously. It immediately messes with your head, but the things that were coming out of his mouth, the things he was saying, was stuff that I had written.

It’s just an interview between him and someone else, but it encompasses a lot, and it also tells the story of the record and answers a lot of questions that I often get. And there are running gags through it, like the interviewer never gets my name right, or never gets any facts right, and didn’t even really listen to the record. They’re all based on some sort of experience that’s true. It’s quite satiric, and for some reason, I got into that a lot. Making a short film, which I’d never done – I’d written a documentary drama once, and that was the only other time that I wrote anything that was scripted. I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, it just became pretty much unuseable. I don’t honestly know what we’re gonna do with it. And I thought, here’s an instance where maybe you’ll have a clip from Punching the Clown, you can have our little thing, and that’ll be its use.

In the umbrella of what I’ve been noticing or pondering a lot is the way comedy either fails or succeeds these days. In some ways, it seems to be thriving as a medium, and in other ways, more interpersonally, people just don’t get it or aren’t receptive to it. We’ll go to television and watch something that’s funny, just to make ourselves feel better for a minute, but it seems a lot harder to just joke around now, because we all are in a pretty dark place that we’re trying to navigate. I’m fascinated by that. I don’t know why the family group texts don’t understand jokes anymore, I just don’t get it. [laughs] It’s just not landing anymore. Is that the death of comedy, at least on that level? 

If I can extrapolate that a little more, how do people deal with this extraordinary period in history which is both interesting from a historical perspective, but also just absolutely terrifying? And yet, here we are talking, here we are carrying on with the things that we do. I do think that it does somehow flavor or color the things that you make. In my case, never directly, but then all of a sudden I’m looking at it afterwards, you’re listening to it afterwards, and putting it in some sort of context. That’s part of perception, I think.

Maybe the usability of the short film comes down to how it contextualizes the record, and whether that’s something you would want it to do.

I had this whole other idea in general, when I made this record and turned it in – I kind of wanted to just quit. Watching the film itself made me sort of want to quit music anyway, the actual Punching the Clown, because it was so dark and spot on. It just made the music industry seem very futile, and that was my reaction to it. It wasn’t, “Ha ha ha, this is a funny, great send-up.” It actually made me think, “We’re all fucked, this is not good.” And so, at some point when we were making the video that we created based on that, it occurred to me that one of the things I would do is Henry would continue to be me, and he would be talking to you right now, or anybody who wanted to interview me. A lot of people probably don’t know me from Adam, and why not him? He can just be on the phone in LA, answering questions, basically being me, continuing the role into real life. This sounded amazing to me, but it also reinforced my feelings about just disappearing, being less of a personality, less of a face that people associate with.

It’s a weird feeling. I don’t know if it’s just because of my age, or my weariness of having done this so long, and the fact that I love so much what I do, and yet those things are connected now in a way that maybe I’m just over. Love you, but I would rather just make another thing and focus on that, and not really on promoting things anymore. It’s challenging, and I’m going through it right now. I feel like maybe I’m letting myself down a little bit, and not sticking to my, “Yep, I’m gone.” But at the same time, I do care about the people I work with, and understand their point of view, so I’m trying to thread my way through satisfying that to some extent.

Politics, love, madness

We touched on it earlier, this crazy era that we’re experiencing, the day-to-day assault that we are under. A lot of it has to do with politics, at least from my perspective where I am right now and what’s going on around me, what’s about to happen. We’re all finding ways to navigate that. It’s an extraordinary period of time starting with the pandemic, and other things are adding to it, like the advent of AI – you pile it all together, and it’s an extraordinary amount of stuff for an individual who’s just trying to live their life to deal with. And so, how do we move through that? How do we love each other? Basic stuff like that, and how even that can get in the way of relationships, because we all process and deal with adversity and terror in different ways. How do we help each other through those things?

It’s madness, or it feels like madness, and it seems to create a sense of madness within us. It can be overwhelming, but yet we have to find out how to get up the next day and deal with it. Maybe I’m just being a baby. Maybe the people in the Middle Ages or whatever had it so much worse. [laughs] I don’t know. I think maybe I am being a bit of a baby, but that’s where we are now. We’re not living in the Middle Ages, we’re not even living in the McCarthy era of the ’50s, or the Nixon era of the United States and what was going on in the ’60s here. If you think about it, this is just a whole new pile of poo.

I’m thinking of a song like ‘White People’, and knowing that you had a pool of songs to choose from, I wonder whether the ones that felt weightier, pertinent, or in some way reflective of the madness were the ones that you found yourself gravitating toward.

It’s trying to find a balance between these, say, 30 songs that we decided to pick from, and a way of presenting them that served a purpose. That’s how we went about making the record even before we started recording. We picked them and put them in order, so we had that in our minds through all of the decision-making that occurred throughout the record, seeing how these things played off of each other. ‘White People’ closes out Side 1, and you’re just left going, “What’s gonna happen?” It’s over, and boom, you’re into this other song, ‘The New World Wave’.

But also, the creation of it was just a different style of writing for me. Well, I had very little to do with it. All I was was a listener of a radio show; I was listening to a friend’s radio show. The first song is Allen Toussaint’s ‘Night People’. And I just thought, “Hmm, what if you changed ‘night’ to ‘white people’?” And then the next line, “Hanging out, looking at each other,” I went, “Well, that’s true.” And then another song comes on, and there’s another line that comes up that seems to fit in with the previous one. And that’s the entire song, me overhearing various lines from various songs. I just put them down in order, and when the show was over, I was like, “Wow, the song’s done.” It was that, in a way, effortless, and it was kind of playful. It had to do with my taking in stuff with this one concept in mind to start it all off, but I didn’t know where it was going. I didn’t know it was going to turn as dark as it did, but it was leading me that way just by listening.

It’s a startling end to Side A, an experience that’s maybe lost in listening to a digital promo of the record.

In the same way, at the end of the entire record, the song ends, and there’s about eight seconds of silence. And then this chorus reappears for a minute, almost like at the end of a film when you’re walking out and there’s an Easter egg or something, and you stop and you go, “Oh, wait, there’s more.” I just wanted to create a moment where you would just sit there with what you’d just heard. And then all of a sudden this other thing just drifts in, and then it’s over. I thought it was an interesting way to present a song, particularly in the mediums that we receive them now, like on Spotify, where it immediately bumps you to the next song. I was kind of fucking with Spotify, in a way, going, “Well, you can’t do that, Spotify, yet.” You’re gonna have to just give somebody a few seconds to just contemplate and process without anything else interrupting your experience.

I think of these things because one of the things about this working-in-sequence thing was that, whenever we would alter something or add something to a particular song we were working on, I couldn’t completely process or accept it without listening to it in context of the entire record, which is a stupid thing to do, because you end up spending 45 minutes each time you’re getting a revision. But I wanted to see how that revision would still feel within what was going on, so I made it so that it still felt right all the way. Not just within the song itself, but in this larger picture that I was really intent on preserving, and my motivation is making this thing as a record. A lot of artists say this, and I’ve said it before, but I don’t think I’ve gone to the extremes that I did this time trying to keep that from the beginning. Never quite got there,  usually because I’d run out of material, to some extent, but this one, I was like, “Wow, I think I got there.”

Disappearing through song

You alluded to this earlier, and there’s something about making ‘White People’ by tuning into something else that also relates to this. But it’s also been an overarching theme in your discography. 

I was never really comfortable with this whole notion of music personality. I knew I loved music, but I didn’t like the attention, I didn’t trust the attention, I felt that there were always other people’s motives involved, and them saying, “Oh, I like this.” I trusted my dad, who would say, “Oh, I hate this,” or “I don’t understand this,” or “Why are you doing this?” Those kinds of comments were debatable and legitimate, you know? But I never was really comfortable with that aspect of this thing that I do, and yet, 30 years have gone by, and I’m still doing it, and still uncomfortable. [laughs] For some reason, I haven’t let that idea go, and I didn’t get Henry to do my interviews for me as much as I wanted to.

And it was remarkable. I’m going back to this, because it just blew my mind when I actually met the guy, and it turned out we were almost like the same people. So I was asking him to play a role, which was me, and we were basically the same people. We’re the same age, we’re at the same point in our creative lives where we’re kind of over it, but we do like doing it, and we’re trying to find a way to gently ease out of that sort of spotlight, and just find out what being 70 is all about as an artist. We had the same phobias, and I was just like, “Damn, you are me.” And I felt he was the perfect person to cast in the role of me, even though he was playing his role as Henry in the thing.

I found it insanely fascinating, and it did play with the idea of me removing myself in some fashion and seeing what happens there. There’s another record that we’re gonna release fairly soon, which is exactly that: the demos from Punching the Clown, but I just took my voice out of it as the singer and asked these other singers to sing it. It’s a simple idea, but it’s not like a cover song, per se. I literally just removed myself from it. And I like that as a way to move forward, so that maybe I can create records and not necessarily sing them. I mean, that’s really all that’s left right now. I don’t really participate in the musical part of it anymore – I don’t play guitar or anything like that. I’m writing songs with Andrew, and he’s writing the music part. I’m focusing on the things that I enjoy, which is writing, and songwriting in particular. I like to sing, but I don’t think it’s necessary in order to present my art.

I can imagine a version of this record that’s even just the choral arrangements and the instrumentation.

People are always interested – later on, people will release the demos of a record, and people get enjoyment out of that. God knows I’ve listened to how many Bob Dylan bootlegs or whatever releases, and I’d listen to every take and watch things develop; sometimes it was magic, sometimes it was through slowly building it up, but learning that there were so many ways to get there. It’s filling the blanks for me, but in this case, this was kind of that experience, but I’m taking my voice out of it, and seeing what would happen if I got another artist and voice that I respected and went, “Please just sing, do whatever you want. You don’t have to think about it a lot, it is a demo.” And they all approached it in their own different ways. It made for a fascinating compendium to the record that we’re releasing. I had simpler goals in mind – I just thought it would be a nice promotional aspect people could check out, but people think it’s a pretty good record, and I do too. It’s not all the songs or anything like that; it doesn’t have the same weight. The concept is truly disappearing.

What makes songs good

You talked about focusing on the songwriting, and I wonder if that was part of what made you hone in on that question. It made me think about another inspirations interview with Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, who also traced the inception of his latest album, Blu Wav, to an old country song he heard on the radio – ‘Tennessee Waltz’ by Patti Page’ – and wanted to make some version of that. He said it was something about the sweetness and simplicity of it that must have resonated, and listening to your record, I feel like there are similar traits that you landed on while pondering this question.

Yeah, that’s interesting, because when I think about it, I didn’t know who did it, and I never found out who made this song. So, that person had disappeared. But it wasn’t necessarily critical to my liking or disliking it. It didn’t even factor into it. So, that was removed, and never to be revealed. I couldn’t even find the song anywhere. All I had was the memory, and that memory, as we know, can be a little squirrely. But that’s fine; however I twisted it became what it was gonna be. It served its purpose as far as, I guess we’re talking about inspiration here, but just the fact that it had triggered something in my head that I was already thinking about, and this was an example of it, fully formed, for me to consider. And it was a reinforcement of a crazy idea I had: I want to make a record with just voice and banjo.

And more than just your voice, especially when the choir comes in. This is something that the song ‘Cigar’ made me think about as an element of what makes a song good, which is the sacredness of singing together.

Yeah, I think having the choral element in it was pretty foundational, as well, to the concept, because I had enjoyed the experiences that I’d had recently at that time playing with just piano, my voice, and the choir. I just found the whole thing incredibly satisfying, and fulfilling enough that I didn’t really need much more. I wanted to explore that in a way that wasn’t necessarily a traditional approach to choral music, thereby making it exciting and challenging for the arranger and choir master. We discussed a lot because he would ask me, “What are you going for here?” and I just wanted to celebrate the glory and the power of the human voice. That sounds a little facetious, but I was pretty sincere about it, because the more I thought about it, and all the variety of the human voice, and how even in its rawest and unskilled manner can still evoke incredible emotion – I wanted it all. I wanted to see that displayed as a bed for a simple presentation of a song.

That was what I heard on the radio: three or four beautiful voices, a clunky banjo, and that was it. And I was like, “Whoa.” It was very moving, whatever it was they were singing. No idea who it was. Couldn’t figure out what the song was. It was just one of those moments. In Jason’s case, I think he probably maybe was responding to other aspects of what he heard, or what it triggered in him. But the fact that it was useful.

You used the word “sincerity,” and I think that’s also part of it. Maybe it’s earnestness, but I feel the record embraces that in a way that feels wholehearted.

If anything, it’s sincere – it’s tempered in a way, and I credit it a lot to Ryan Olson, the producer and the guy that I work with, to keep it honest so it can be sincere, but not to the point of being self-aggrandizing. It keeps it humble by throwing in things that are fairly irreverent, or unexpected, and maybe to some ears unnecessary and disruptive to their preciousness about this thing I’m creating. There are people who listen to it who want a precious, beautiful, acoustic choir record that’s just beautifully, pristinely recorded and all of that, and that’s all they want. And that’s fine – there’s plenty of music like that. But I wanted to create something you hadn’t heard before, or an experience that was new territory. Kind of taking an established sort of form of music – folk, country, or whatever you want to call it – and giving it a slap in the face, like, “Wake up.” This can be all of that, but there’s more. We’re living in this wild time right now, and this represents the here and now, not the way it was.

In the past, I didn’t understand that, and maybe I drifted toward soul music a little bit too ham-fistedly. But we were so inept in our presentation of it that we survived because we weren’t capable yet of doing that properly, and that’s what’s charming about it, and that’s what people are finding interesting, is our ineptness. 

I mean, whoever goes into this record expecting this precious thing immediately gets hit with, “Lambchop, new shit!”

Right away! You get into it, and goddammit, it’s great, and then comes this thing. There are times when I’ll hear that song, and I won’t hear it in it, and I go, “Did I miss it?” You know? And there’s other times where it just stands out like crazy, and I know it’s in there now, but sometimes I actually don’t even hear it. It goes to a whole other thing about selective listening and how we can zero in on something in the sounds that are surrounding us and tune out others. 

Artist relationships

Working with people that I have a relationship with, as opposed to just people that fit the bill for a particular assignment, and creating things with your friends – that’s how Lambchop started, man. You know, we were just sitting around on a Wednesday night, making music for each other, having a good time, and it grew out of that. I feel that at this point, I’ve worked with many people, but I prefer to really just do stuff with friends, so I have more than just a musical experience, but an enriching experience in a relationship. As you grow older, you have many more than you started with, hopefully, and as time goes on, I’ve also lost a shit ton of them. Really important figures in my creative life, untimely deaths – not to whine or whatever, but I think I’ve had more than my share of this happen to me. Their lives are still with me, and the impressions that they’ve left upon the way I operate as an artist and are indelible. But even in the course of making this record, I lost a couple of really close friends, absolute foundational artists that I went to art school with, and that we connected at that time with a similar type of aesthetic, or reinforced each other’s diverse aesthetics. 

Could you paint a picture of how your friendship with the people who worked on Punching the Clown developed during the making of it?

I think it informed very much how this record evolved. Initially, there came a point where I encountered all these people from Minneapolis together at this thing in Berlin called the PEOPLE Festival. It was a huge gathering, maybe a couple hundred artists all together for a week working together, and then we were gonna do performances over the weekend as part of a festival. It was pretty overwhelming. I had no plan going in there. I didn’t really know why I was there. I liked the notion of it, sort of, but once I got there, it all seemed pretty weird and not really for me. But there was a group of people there that were all from Minneapolis, and I got along with them like I’d known them all my life. There were a few I’d known prior to that, but a lot of them I didn’t. And that’s how I started working with Andrew, how I started working with Ryan. Justin was there, and we had crossed paths many years prior to that when he was first starting out, and really enjoyed each other’s company back then. So we were able to go, “Oh, hey!” and reconnect there.

Unlocking this whole other world that I didn’t realize existed in Minneapolis changed my life to the point where I gradually started going up there to work and exploring, “What’s going on with these guys?” This is the third record that’s connected with them. Prior to even making the record, we had finished this record called The Bible, and I was driving around with Ryan, and he was going, “So, what are we gonna do next?” And I went, “I don’t know, I kind of have this weird idea about choirs and stuff.” And it was like, “Huh.” And three years later or whatever, there’s this record.

The Bible was a full-on embracing of whatever it was that they did up there. I wanted to experience that, and then this record is learning from that experience – both what not to do, and maybe how we can move forward with something that’s pretty satisfying for both myself and Ryan as the sort of overarching ringleader of that collective – I don’t know what to call it. It’s just a scene up there that’s just incredible. I completely gave myself over to it, to the point that now it’s really where I make music now. Don’t really do much here other than answer emails, and talk, and write songs. I don’t think you can really call it a Nashville band anymore. I don’t know if you can call it a Minneapolis thing, either. I think it’s just Lambchop, and Lambchop is whoever’s willing to put up with what I do.

It’s not like Ryan was ever gonna make this kind of record. It was absolutely a challenge to him. It was like, “Have you ever made anything like this before?” “Well, no.” “Have you ever played banjo before?” “No, but I’ve been fooling around.” “Great, let’s do that.” To me, it’s already good that you like these people as artists, you respect their work. Let’s just challenge it a little bit more, let’s just try to find out: Is the art you make all about your falsetto, or is it something else? Is it about the actual songs you write? Is it the thing you’re making, these records? And how does that happen? And who’s involved? It turns out they’re all in fucking Minneapolis! And it’s a remarkable sort of place to do things, and little do I know, it’s been going on a long time. It’s just not really considered as one of the hotbeds of creativity, even though it’s produced some incredibly significant music.

Visual artists/slogans

You’ve shared a couple of quotes – “This picture is never finished” by David Dunlap and “I’m at war with the obvious” by William Eggleston – along with a list of other artists, including Gerhard Richter, Kerry James Marshall, Howard Finster. Help me contextualize them a little bit.

I noticed that you did like to preface each section with some visual, so I listed a lot of names and artists that we can talk about. I mentioned the two quotes because they are sort of foundational things that have hung around in my brain ever since I heard them. I had a teacher in grad school for a bit of time, his name was David Dunlap. One of the things that he did was this ongoing thing where life and art are all sort of one thing, and he basically kept a lot of little bitty notebooks. He would fill them up with drawings and thoughts, and often they would have slogans of one kind or another: “This picture is never finished” was one. I liked that one, and I mentioned it in this context because in a lot of ways, it’s one of the big questions that artists have: When is something done? Or is it done? Will it ever be done? Because it lives on in the receiver’s consciousness, and as I mentioned before, memory can be a squirrely thing, and maybe it’s not exactly the same picture that it is anymore. You have altered it through your own filters.

And the other one – Eggleston was a photographer who was in Memphis when I was in Memphis going to undergrad school in art. He was already one of the major photographers that broke into this whole new form of photography, or a way of looking at photography. I was fascinated by him for a lot of reasons. He’s quite a personality and gentle, a Southern gentleman. He fancied himself a bit of a pianist as well, but he has a connection to the music scene and the art scene in Memphis. There was a doc, Stranded in Canton, and at one point he mentioned this thing, that he’s at war with the obvious. Which was interesting, because when you look at his photographs, they couldn’t be more… obvious. Or not obvious, but there’s nothing there. It’s a beautiful shot, the printing process is great, but the thing that you’re looking at is unremarkable. Yet, you are looking at it, and you are drawn to it. He’s found a way to take something that’s unremarkable and make it something to remark upon. A simple phrase like that can totally explain what an artist does, and it stuck with me.

These other artists are pretty big for me. Gerhard Richter, which everybody should be familiar with. Kerry James Marshall is a Chicago artist who seems like he came out of nowhere, but he’s been making incredible art in Chicago. He lives in the same kind of rundown part of Chicago he;s from, and continues to, even though I’m sure he could live anywhere he wants. His work is absolutely astounding.

I mentioned Howard Finster, mainly because one of the songs on this record is almost entirely text from one of Finster’s small drawings that I acquired. It’s a very small little drawing, but Finster mainly works with simple, crude imagery and a lot of textual information, because I think he was a preacher, and so a lot of it is a religious-y kind of thing. There’s a song called ‘Andrew Jackson Ass Hat’, and the lyrics of the song are the text from a drawing of Andrew Jackson, with a little bit of tweakery on my part. But the image is a line drawing of Andrew Jackson, and I don’t understand what his association with this guy, Andrew Jackson, was, because it doesn’t seem like there should be any reason to celebrate him in any sort of religious context, so it’s a bit of a mystery. 

The thing about folk artists that stuns you and bowls you over when they discover these guys that no one knew about is the volume of work and their dedication to just making things. They’ll find these guys, and their houses are just jam-packed with a lifetime’s worth of pursuit of this thing. I’ve always been impressed by that: that if you can just keep your head down and keep working, that in itself is a life worth living.

His father’s apartment

Ever since I got out of art school, I decided I’m not really gonna participate in the commercial art business, nobody was interested, and I’m just gonna be like a folk artist and just make things and hang them on my wall. And that was fine, I was literally working out of the house, but as time went on, I got married, and I remembered that I really enjoyed having my own studio. Even in art school, having an assigned space, a studio that was where you would go, separate from the rest of your doings. I tried to maintain that as long as I could, and there was a period of time where I didn’t have one for a while, and then this, I guess you’d call it an opportunity, presented itself when my father had passed away and left us his apartment. I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with all of that, but I did know that I could just take a corner of that space and make it a place to work again.

That coincided with the beginnings of working on this record. I wrote for two and a half years or whatever there, and it was so great to have that space to work in again. I had forgotten how important it was, and it was the best time in my life. I didn’t want it to end, because it had become such a beautiful routine intermeshed with my life in general. All this other junk was just gonna interrupt it, and I wasn’t gonna be able to do that for a while, which is why I was grumbling and bitching to begin with. It is all fine, and I will get back to it, because that place is still there, and I would be there now, but I’m waiting on a package. [laughs]

But it became more than that. I didn’t know what to do with the space when he passed away. I didn’t know how to address any of it, so I did nothing. I just left it exactly the way it was from the moment he passed. And then, over time, when I would open the door to the space, it was like they were still there. They really weren’t gone. Maybe they were off at the store, or, I don’t know, went to the movies, and I was just coming into that space. So they weren’t gone, and that was comforting to me. And over time, I started exploring and poking around, “What’s this book by the bedside table? Is this the last thing that he read?” And then started thinking about, “What were the last words that he had read?” I would start to wonder if that was the case and explore that particular book. It turned out it was a book I gave him, and then there was another book; turns out he suddenly discovered Cormac McCarthy very late in his life and really loved it. “Is this the last line that he read?”

I actually found several books that I gave him, like Raymond Carver or Walker Percy, that made me wonder: Did he read them? They were on the shelf, it doesn’t necessarily mean he read them. I was trying to see things through his eyes, because suddenly I was comfortable enough with thinking about things in that way. It took a while, man. Slowly but surely, we transformed the place. It’s still sort of museum-y, but it’s become a place for our families when they come to stay, for guests. People we know – we don’t rent it out or anything like that – so it’s sort of an adjunct living space for us that really functions mainly as my place of work. It’s weird to call it a studio, because it’s really not a recording studio. It could be more like a painting studio, which is kind of how I look at it.

There were some other things, like Hemingway. I’ve always had a love-hate thing with Hemingway,  but there was a collection of early essays, and I think the first one was ‘Indian Camp’. I read it, and it ended with this kid in a rowboat with his father. And suddenly I was really moved, just sitting there at his desk going, “Wow.” Partly dealing with whatever they call grief, but it was also getting a bigger, broader understanding and allowing myself time and space to do that. I’d go into the next room and I’d be writing again, and sometimes I would try to address it directly, but somehow, peripherally, it’s definitely in there.

But there were some bad books in there. He fancied himself a bit of an intellectual, and he was, to the point of blinders, where he didn’t really understand people unless they were just what he called “super intelligent.” That was the measure of a man for him, how smart they were, and what they achieved through that smartness. So to me, he always had a bit of a blind side when it came to real life. He lived in this fantasy world; he was a scientist, and he lived – a similar thing to what I do – in world in their head, where they have ideas, and they’re always thinking about it. And it tends to make them not really pay attention to, I don’t know, a broken faucet, or the plight of the working people. Even though he was sympathetic to it, he didn’t understand it. He literally needed to get out more and experience what it’s like to not have anything. The price I was paying for finally getting a place to work was reconciling with all this other stuff while I’m knocking around this apartment, and I thought, “Is that inspirational?” Well, yeah, I think it factors what the fuck I was doing – still doing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Lambchop’s Punching the Clown is out August 21 via City Slang.