Lambchop to play Enchanted Garden
April 23rd, 2002 by freddie96
It takes a small miracle to get twelve people to gather together regulary. It takes a somewhat bigger miracle if those twelve all hold down full-time jobs as floor sanders, journalists, carpenters, sound engineers and the like. It is an even bigger miracle when those twelve people all gather together, in what little spare time they have, to create the music of mournful depth, moving sincerity and perverse wisdom for which Lambchop have become famous.
But perhaps the biggest miracle of all is that Lambchop have just agreed to play live at this year’s Enchanted Garden.
Over six albums (and one mini-album) of remarkable beauty, Nashville’s finest (and largest) collective have honed and refined their country-drenched soul music, creating some of the most elegant and touching melancholia to have emerged from both the city and its tradition.
Anyone who caught their memorable outdoor performance in the courtyard of Somerset House in the summer of 2001 will know that Lambchop’s most recent work – showcased on their new album, ‘Is A Woman’ – will be perfect for the special ambience found in The Enchanted Garden.
Appropriately enough, most of Lambchop’s new songs were first written in an outdoors setting. As Kurt Wagner, founder of Lambchop, explains: ‘Most of these songs were written out in the back yard on a laptop that I borrowed from my father, sitting under a mimosa tree. I had just quit my job of fourteen years in a rather abrupt but liberating way on July 4th to try to give myself the chance to give more attention to writing better songs.
‘So I ended up sitting in the back yard, writing every morning, drinking coffee, and being pretty freaked about the sudden hard right turn I just made with my life. The light was sharp and clear, the sun was warm as the mornings would grow late and the sounds and sights around me were screaming and amplified and laden with meaning, relevance and potential. And there I sat, soaking it all up, putting it down, editing it around… gathering information to be collated and distilled into songs that I would later complete in the basement, singing or playing into a cheap little Sony tape recorder.’
Described alternatively as the sound of Curtis Mayfield had he grown up in Nashville and ‘Brian Eno meets Ray Charles’, the results of this work have been widely hailed as Lambchop’s best work yet. If you haven’t heard them yet you are certainly in for a treat.
More about The Enchanted Garden
[galleryurl=http://www.bigchill.net/gallery.html?id=15]EG2001 photos[/galleryurl]
