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Given his way with words, it’s incredibly apt that Wagner paints not with a brush, but with the tip of an old fountain pen. “It has a very fine point on it, more like a needle,” he says. “I use one tube of black and one tube of white, and I apply the paint thickly on a canvas or a board.” He essentially sculpts the paint onto the canvas, which creates the effect of a woodcut or linocut – simultaneously two and three dimensional. That technique can be laborious: “I can average about three or four square inches in a sitting, so it can take a long time.” Some larger canvases can take up to a year to complete.
Wagner works almost exclusively from pre-existing material – primarily old newspaper prints or family photographs, most of which are donated by friends. “I look at the photograph as an object, as opposed to just an image,” he explains. “I could paint an apple, or I could paint this piece of paper with this image on it.”
These are techniques and approaches he developed early in his art career and has evolved over the decades since, yet when he resumed painting after his long hiatus, Wagner had to make some adjustments. “Originally the paintings were gigantic,” he explains. “They were four-by-four or six-by-six, and they took a long time. Since I started back, I’ve been a little bit more judicious about the size.” The Beautillion Militaire series are roughly six inches by six inches – slightly larger than a CD cover but slightly smaller than an LP cover. “I don’t think I’m the greatest painting technician, although the beauty of working in the same medium over the course of so many years is that you tend to get a little more skilled at it. It took me a while to get that back.”
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His return to painting in 2008 proved fortuitously timed, as not long after he faced a terrible tragedy: the death of longtime friend and collaborator Vic Chesnutt. Chesnutt did the artwork for Lambchop’s 1998 album What Another Man Spills, line drawings that first appear to be scribbles but gradually reveal figures lurking in the tangled forms. That same year, Lambchop backed Chesnutt on his album The Salesman And Bernadette. He died on Christmas Day 2009, after an overdose of muscle relaxants.
“It was pretty significant for me as a musician and as a person who makes things,” Wagner explains. “Vic was pretty influential and instrumental in the very fact that I made music. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about making music again, because he’d always been there. I’d always known that he would be part of the listeners who are out there. We’d communicate through the records we made, and with him not around anymore, I didn’t know how to proceed. It was fortunate and coincidental that I was painting at the time. I was able to keep working, but it took a while to get around to making music again without Vic being there.”
Painting became his primary creative outlet, and Wagner allowed himself to rethink almost every aspect of his songwriting. “When I started back, it was a tenuous sort of thing,” he says. “I was just going to work on these songs for an extended period of time and just let time influence the way I went about making a song. I read somewhere that Leonard Cohen could work a year on a song. I thought, that’s how I paint!” So he gave himself as much time as the songs needed, living with the lyrics and ideas for months and months. “I hadn’t tried that before, but I really wanted to craft these things. Even using the word ‘craft’ is something I’ve rarely done before.”
After he’d been living with these songs for a year or so, Wagner received a call from friend and longtime Lambchop producer Mark Nevers, who had a concept for the next record. “He had found this particular Frank Sinatra song and was curious about how it was arranged,” Wagner recalls. “To his ear, the strings had a very abstract, not-quite-melodic quality. When he explained it to me, I thought some of the songs I was writing at the time would work in that setting.”
Wagner himself wanted a more elemental sound for the songs on Mr. M, something that would emphasize a smaller group of musicians rather than a full orchestra of friends. “Lambchop live can be lots of players, but what I was really trying for here is a little more open, a little more minimal.”
It’s tempting to describe the music in terms more suited to painting: The songs burst with vivid imagery and well-drawn characters, and Nevers’ strings swoop around like brushstrokes on canvas. But these songs aren’t painterly or sculptural; they’re musical and lyrical. Still, there is a particular tactility to Wagner’s lyrics, as on “2B2,” with its curious mismatch of sensory details: “It was good to talk to you while we’re cooking,” he sings. “Sounds like we’re making the same thing.” The result is an album paradoxically sparse in sound but rich in sensation: Lambchop’s liveliest collection in a decade.
