Friendship and Lambchop Balance Art and Real Life

Dan Wriggins is a writer and musician from Maine, and currently based in Philadelphia, who fronts the band Friendship; Kurt Wagner is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter who fronts the band Lambchop. The new Friendship record, Caveman Wakes Up, just came out (via Merge), so to celebrate, Dan and Kurt got on Zoom to catch up. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Kurt Wagner: Oh, man. I’m so glad to see you. It’s always a pleasure.

Dan Wriggins: Good to see you, too. I still tell the story of the stuff that waitress said at that diner last time we hung out.

Kurt: That was weird, man. 

Dan: That thing about, while you’re driving, “You can break one law, you just don’t wanna break two.” She said, “You can drink and drive, just don’t drink and speed and drive. Or you can speed, just don’t be drinking.”

Kurt: And Roy [Dan’s dog] didn’t like her!

Dan: Aw, well, he was barking at other people coming in, I think. 

Kurt: Oh, OK. He liked her because she kept giving him treats.

Dan: That’s right.

Kurt: Roy goes with you everywhere, right? 

Dan: He goes with me a lot. I mean, if it’s a big tour, I’d prefer not to take him. so if I have somebody that can watch him, usually he stays with somebody. But certain tours, I do take him and he’s been fine. Did you ever take a dog on tour?

Kurt: Man, probably not on tour. When we were starting out, we had two, and they were pretty big. We always talked about it, but most of the time, they would have just been bored as shit. But it would have been cool to see them run around some festival sites, getting into trouble.

Dan: Yeah. We’ve done more touring without Roy than we have with him, but we have taken him on certain ones, and it’s usually a hassle. But most green rooms and hotels, if you ask, they’re fine with it. The other thing that I always liked was that in the early years of Friendship, we were booking DIY tours all over the place, and it was often basements we were playing in, people’s house venues. For those it was great, because he’d just be wandering around the show. He enjoyed it, and then also, before we even played we had already kind of been endeared to the whole crowd. So he was helping us out. 

Kurt: We practiced almost exclusively in our basement at the house, and the dogs would always be hanging out down there. We knew we had a good one if old Jack would just sit on down and listen. They were a good barometer for our bullshit.

Dan: What’s the cover of Jack’s Tulips?

Kurt: That dog on the cover isn’t Jack. One of the guys in Lambchop named Scott Chase, his wife had a picture that they wanted me to paint and that was the picture. But the [title] Jack’s Tulips — when Mary [Mancini, Kurt’s wife] and I were going out, whenever we’d take them for a walk, he would pee on these same tulips just relentlessly. And eventually, of course, they didn’t make it, but even when they were dead, he’d still pee in that same spot. I don’t know what possessed me to connect that with the record, other than in the making of it, we found out it was going to be two discs and I thought, “Well, we should have two titles [I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips], one on each side of the spine.” Little did I know that it opens up and there’s only one spine, but I stuck with it. 

Dan: What counts as the first Friendship full-length release — we don’t have it on streaming, it is on Bandcamp, but we’re not that proud of it anymore so we don’t push it, but some people did like it so we keep it available — I titled it, You’re Going to Have to Trust Me. And certainly part of that was influenced by thinking I Hope You’re Sitting Down is such a sick title for a debut record.

Kurt: Well, that’s sweet. I remember telling Mac [McCaughn from Merge] that, and Mac was like, “What the fuck?” I was like, “You know, it’s like delivering the bad news.” But I stuck to my guns, and he thought it was cool because it also could mean, “watch out.” And also, I sat down when I played.

Dan: I was doing that too, man. I stole that from you guys.

Kurt: Oh, yeah?

Dan: Yeah. But we had pedal steel and a synth player, so it felt like the same thing, like, “Well, might as well have me sit down, too.”

Kurt: So what’s up with Hour? They’re awesome. 

Dan: For sure. I mean, that’s Michael [Cormier-O’Leary]’s real composition project. He’s got a million ideas. I think they started about 2017 when Mike and I were living together. They would practice in the middle room of this carriage house that we lived in, so I’d be sitting there playing video games and listening to them play, and I was so amazed. They’re my favorite band. It’s evolved over the years in terms of membership. It’s rotating, and it’s kind of whoever of the people that Mike asks can do it — which maybe early Lambchop was similar. The most they’ve ever done live is 12 people, but usually it’s five to eight or something. 

Kurt: When y’all were down in Durham, Mac sent me a picture, and somebody else texted me, “Man, there’s some Lambchop vibes going on here.” I looked and I said, “Well, there’s a buttload of people.” And I did recognize a few. But I had no idea what it sounded like. And I am remiss in not trying to find out what they do sound like, but I will. So did he start Dear Life in order to put out Hour records?

Dan: A little bit, I think. He started Dear Life in 2019. Just some friends records and Mike’s own stuff at first, and then a lot changed when MJ Lenderman’s stuff blew up. But it really feels so central to my scene and community, and I’m so proud of those guys. 

Kurt: It’s great. I mean, I know that there’s still a ton of indie operations going on now that try to release stuff. But to actually have that as part of what you do, it sort of separates it from just a bunch of people put out mixtapes, or whatever they’re called these days. 

Dan: Yeah, right. Man, there was something the Dear Life guys did during the pandemic that I really loved — everyone was doing these Zoom concerts, but what Mike and Jon [Samuels] did was they figured out a way to do a full day long Twitch festival. In between each act, the video would be some live video, and then it would swap over to Jon in some basement with all these weird things on his screen. He was like the host and he would talk and do goofy shit. It really felt curated and cool. And there was a chat, so people could be responding in real time. 

Kurt: When it started, I had mixed feelings about that whole medium. There was something that seemed real sad about it to me. It was something about the separation of it all and the awkwardness. And, I mean, it got to the point where they were well-produced things. In fact, the more they were produced, the sadder and sadder it was. But there was a Twitch thing that BJ Burton did on occasion, and it was just him in his space working. He had it set up so you could look at the screen that he’s working from. It was just real casual, but it was cool as shit. I really got a lot out of that. 

Dan: A lot of people started Patreons where part of the feature was you could hear their demos or see their drafts. For me, that’s always been like, “No way, dude, I do not want you to see the draft. There’s a reason they’re drafts.” My first ideas usually suck. I hammer at them for a long, long time until they don’t suck anymore and they become good.

Kurt: Yeah. I’ve got a huge stack of shit that was just on the way to something, and I need to get rid of that. Because I can kick off, and then people go, “Ooh, wow!” And it’s just terrible. Like, there’s what I leave behind: a bunch of crap. But painting, I think I could get a lot out of [seeing people’s drafts]. I have watched Picasso painting on the glass or whatever. It’s great to watch that actually happen. And I would take photos of the things I’m painting every day, and then over time, you see it take place, and I’m always like, Damn, why didn’t I stop way the fuck back? It’s always been this thing that haunts me about painting in general — why do I have to fucking fill every inch with something? Why can’t I just leave it alone? I should have the wisdom to say, “Wow, that looks great. Maybe I should stop before I fuck it up.” But the big question is: how do you know when something’s done? Do you know? I don’t.

Dan: Do you know Yves Jarvis?

Kurt: No.

Dan: He just put out a new record. He’s awesome. I saw an interview with him once where they asked that question, “How do you know when something is done?” And I had been interviewed in the same thing, and my response was long and kind of roundabout, but he just said two words: “Diminishing returns.”

Kurt: When I’ve been writing lately, I think it’s the same kind of answer. But it’s more like it just, frankly, takes my breath away. It’s sort of like, Oh, fuck. I guess that’s done. I don’t really get that out of painting. It’s more like, Well, I’ve done my little thing and I guess I’m done now. It’s often just a sigh of relief rather than, Here’s this thing and I feel good about it.

Dan: Yeah. I’ve basically never thought about this, but I do have a physiological litmus test which is that, just for melodies, I really do without any thought start crying if something’s really good while I’m playing.

Kurt: That happens to me.

Dan: I’m like, Oh, OK, that must mean something.

Kurt: Does it ever happen down the line, like you’ve been playing the song live and it’ll still choke you up?

Dan: So rarely. But I think it will.

Kurt: There’s some that still, I can’t get through it. It may happen at a different point in the song, but there’ll be some point where I’ve totally blown it as a singer because I’m just hardly able to do it. But sometimes that’s the moment, and not the music necessarily.

I went to a wedding over the weekend, and I was talking to the father of the bride. He was getting pretty emotional, and he confided in me that he’d had some heart surgery or something, and ever since, he’s been super emotional and breaking down at odd times. He couldn’t figure it out because he wasn’t like that prior to the heart surgery. I was thinking about it, and as I age, I noticed that I get overcome by stuff more than I used to. And then I started thinking about my dad and as he got older, it was the same thing, where you get a little weepy. And it’s not like grief or anything, necessarily. It’s just more like, you just take things in in a way that forces that thing into existence. 

Dan: There’s a poet I really love, Dean Young, who died a couple of years ago, and many years before that, he had a heart transplant. I mean, he’s a kind of surrealist, goofy, jokester guy, and he wrote about it in that playful way. I remember him making jokes about, “Yep, now I’m emotionally different, because of course I am, I have a different person’s heart.”

Kurt: I can see where, as a poet, there’s  pretty juicy stuff there. [Laughs.]

Dan: Yeah, he’s great. I really love him. 

Kurt: The people who were teaching at Iowa when you were there [Dan is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Poetry], did you find them formative? Were there people that you really admired and all that shit?

Dan: Basically, there were three main faculty and I got a lot from each person, although I would say I got more from my peers. It didn’t feel like some big mentor thing, the way some people get. It’s just the luck of the draw, whether the faculty is people you really jive with. 

Kurt: It was the same for me [Kurt went to graduate school at Montana State for painting] — it’s the people you were there with, the other artists that were there. Even after you got out, just seeing how their lives went and how mine went and all that. It’s just reinforcing the whole notion that the thing we do, you’re not totally crazy. 

I still believe there’s a certain amount of insanity involved in what I do. More and more, I just think I’m going fucking insane when I’m writing. I go to this place and I don’t know if I like it. Or, it’s not that I don’t like it — I love the result and the feeling of accomplishment — but, man, sometimes I literally think I’m insane. The way I’m working now is this schedule where I go in and spend however many hours I got until I have to go home and walk the dog and cook dinner. So there is sort of an end point that I’m not in control of, and that does create an urgency sometimes that’s probably unnecessary. I could easily go, “Fuck it, I’ll just go home when I’m ready.” But I don’t. So I just go off for as long as I have, and then I have to cut it off and come back to literal reality. And that’s a hard change. It’s a hard stop and a blink, and then next thing you’re out the door and you’re driving home, listening to the news. Inevitably, you’ll be fighting along with it, and then finally you figure shit out, and it’s like, Ah, I gotta go feed the dog. [Laughs.] Gotta get on with life. Which I do think is a healthy thing. It’s what keeps me not totally in the loony bin all the time. A lot of the artists that I love, they were fucking crazy, and lived the life accordingly where there would be somebody basically taking care of them, whether it was a spouse or a girlfriend or whatever. There would be someone helping them with all the the stuff of life, and they would just stay in their shit. Which I sort of envy. But I also feel bad for the significant other. It takes its toll on your partner, and I never wanted to put my wife through any of that.

You’ve mentioned that you go away usually when you’re working on a record or writing, so you can stay out there in crazy town for a while and you don’t have to necessarily engage with normal routine things. Is that how you operate?

Dan: Sometimes. But I suppose recently it’s been more of the routine life. What we’ve done before is gone to a studio that’s not where we live to record, and that’s maybe a week. And if the four guys in the band are living there and don’t have anything else to do, then that feels special. The last record we just made, we did make in Philly, so it was back to sort of normal, you’d go home every night. Then when it comes to writing stuff, the last few years I’ve lived in different places, so it’s been hard to either find a routine or find a retreat style thing. 

And very much feel the same as you. In certain ways, I’m envious of certain artists — I’m thinking historical cases — people who only lived the art practice. But I’m envious of it and I also can’t really imagine it, and in a way would never want to be that way. 

Kurt: Well, usually they end up being a pretty solitary person in order to achieve that level. I’ve known folks like that too, particularly visual artists. You go visit them and their home is a bomb site. You can tell they spend very little time other than the necessary stuff to stay alive. I’ve always thought, Wow, that’s such a great way to be. But this is the closest I’ve been, the last year or so, to having stopped everything and just focusing on writing and life and that’s it. Not fussing with any sort of music business. It really is as close as I think I can get to that without completely uncoupling myself from the rest of my life — and I can’t do that. The two are so connected, what I do as a writer and what I live. You want that in your life. Otherwise then you’re just going to write about how crazy you are. Which some people do.

Dan: And it works. Or, sometimes it works. 

Kurt: Yeah, sometimes. 

Dan: Do you like it? Not having to deal with the business, has that been feeling good this year?

Kurt: I’ve been loving it. I’m ready to get this record going, but in the meantime, I’m still writing. I’m really not looking forward to having to switch it up and do what you’re having to do lately. But I hope you’re getting something positive out of all of it, as far as the promotion. I used to find a way to — or maybe it was just tricking myself to — think that the process of promoting and talking about the thing that you made can be a good thing, in that you don’t really articulate it at the time and you can use this part of the cycle to get something out of it for yourself. As opposed to, I don’t know, just saying, “Hey, look at me.”

Dan:  Yeah, I don’t mind it. Sometimes some website will ask for a track-by-track breakdown, and I feel like I know people who would scoff at that, like, “Well, the song speaks for itself.” Or even saying, “I’m not an expert on my own song. The song is its own expert, so why should I analyze it for you?” But I kind of feel the opposite of that. Since I’m as equal of an expert on the song as someone else, why not analyze it?

Kurt: I think that probably comes out of the academic thing that we both went through. You’re there and you can’t just say, “Well, I ain’t talking about this shit.” They’re going to go, “Well, why are you fucking here?” 

Dan: Right.

Kurt: And they’re absolutely correct. It forces you to articulate shit that I’d rather just not. I don’t want to analyze my ass too much about shit, because then you’re fucking with the machine in a way that maybe isn’t healthy. But it turns out that it can be healthy. And I’ve truly convinced myself over the years doing the interviews, if I could just get a a good conversation and come out of that with something I hadn’t thought about before, then that’s a good thing. The trouble is, sometimes when you analyze your shit track-by-track — I’ve done it several times for releases, because that’s an idea that the labels have — it ends up being kind of a script. So I used to challenge myself to come up with a different answer every time. Is there anything else about what was going on, other than that? Because I already said that to so-and-so. And it’s really hard if you’re doing a dick load of interviews. 

I mean, as an artist, I love listening to people talk about making art, but I honestly don’t know at this point who reads this shit other than other artists. [Laughs.] I think it’s challenging for us to try to make something promotable that’s worth a shit. That “Resident Evil” thing just came out, which is great, but that’s an exception. A lot of times it ain’t great. A lot of times it’s a lyric video — which I find just weird. I don’t mind looking at a sheet of paper and listening to an album or whatever, but the bouncing ball thing…

Dan: [Laughs.] Yeah. When we were talking about doing this, I thought of one serious question that I have for you — it’s a theory that I want to describe, and then ask you about it, because it’s something I think a lot about. When you’re just starting out making art, every little decision feels so important. But then you keep on making stuff, and maybe you get a little more of an equalized relationship to your own work. Something I’ve noticed and thought about is that with a lot of my favorite artists, there’s this balance between doing what you’re good at and experimentation. If you just keep playing the hits and playing your strengths and making the same record over and over again — a lot of people do that, nothing wrong with that. But as a fan, it often feels kind of stagnant. And then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum where, if you are super schizo about it and every couple years you make something that’s totally different, that could be fulfilling and cool but you also might not be very good at each thing, because you’re starting totally new. And so all my favorite artists have struck this balance where each new thing, they are messing with something else, but they’re also not totally reinventing the wheel of their skills. 

My mom’s been a potter her whole life, and I’m always just amazed at how each year I’ll come home and I’ll see some new glaze that she’s got. She’s like, “Yeah, I’m messing with this.” But of course, everything else looks the same. She’s struck this beautiful balance of refinement and experimentation within what she’s already good at. And I feel like you’re a little far towards the experimenting end of the spectrum. [Laughs.] I mean, you do not play the hits at every show. I’m curious if you see yourself that way, how you think about that. I mean, obviously it has a bunch of different implications for the business itself…

Kurt: [Laughs.] Yeah. In general, as far as the performing thing, I’ve always just tried to be who I am at that moment as opposed to who I was. When I go see an artist, I want to see who they are today. I don’t want to see a projection or a film of them performing 10 years ago. I came to see artist X that day, I want to see how old and grizzled he is. So it always seemed natural to just go, “Well, this is what we’re up to now.” From the start, it was all about, “We’re out on tour, but we’re making another record and that’s what’s for dinner. That’s what we’re ingesting.” It just made logical sense. I didn’t think about it. And as far as the actual making of shit, for me, there’s always been a through line or a connector or a signal in what we made previously as to where we’re going to go next. To me, it’s all one big long continuum. Although I am finding that it’s starting to roll around now, as I start to think about the writer I was and the things I was making at the very beginning, and going, I haven’t done that in a while… 

You said your mother’s a potter, not a ceramicist. So there’s something constant about what she makes, and the glazing of it becomes the exploration. The pot itself is really just the canvas. Or am I getting that wrong?

Dan: No, that’s pretty correct. I mean, the formation of the pots is a skill and an artistry, so that is a thing. But once you’re at a certain level with, especially when you’re making functional stuff — yeah, she does have her style and she’ll experiment with that, but it is more about the glaze as artistic decoration that she experiments with more.

Kurt: So, let’s say the song is the pot, and the glaze is the record or the way you finish presenting it to someone.

Dan: Right. Style and substance, you need them both. And literally the word, too — I’ve always thought it was kind of badass that she’s a major artistic soul, and yet since she only makes functional stuff, she would never call herself a “ceramicist.” 

Well, Kurt, I think we probably have enough here. 

Kurt: Hell yeah. Man, it’s really been a pleasure. It was great talking. I’m not much into any of this shit right now, but anything you need from me, Dan, I’m there. Have a good one!

Dan: Take it easy!