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 voicespurred 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 singersrevealing the raw beauty and power of the human voice with its unique varietiesits unadorned simplicity gave weight to the words as they were sung.i wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music."