On 4th November, Kurt Wagner aka Lambchop returns with a brand new album FLOTUS, which stands for For Love Often Turns Us Still (and not “First Lady of the United States” as one might first assume). For this album, Wagner tried to deliberately set aside what he’d learned over the past 30 years and concentrate on making an album that both himself and his neighbours would listen to.
He became inspired by modern R&B, soul and hip hop among other genres. He says: “Overall, artists like myself have been using the same production techniques forever, letting technology enhance and further a sound but not really taking it to a new place. Technology bending to the will of the creator became playful, complex, and exciting to hear on repeat with a structure still open to interpretation.”
The first taste of FLOTUS is its final track, ‘The Hustle.’ It shifts somewhat between undefined movements, with elements of krautrock, early electronica and laced with piano and horns, which gives it a more recognisably Lambchop sound. Listen below.
Wagner talked about the tale behind ‘The Hustle’: “My wife and I attended this wedding of one her college friends in the countryside outside of Nashville. Weddings are a heady mix of emotions, memories, and events that can be quite rich in imagery. With this being a Quaker wedding, there was a lack of ‘officiating’ in that the bride and groom addressed each other directly the entire time. This was something that I found to be most touching. Beyond that, as with much of my writing, I tend to describe experiences in an almost journalistic fashion and then strip things down till there is barely a thread to hold them together—in this case, starting with the vows and then moving on from there. The entire wedding party was doing this great synchronized dance step that I hadn’t seen before. I asked my wife what dance it was, and she told me it was the Hustle. She suggested I join them. I respectfully declined.”
