13th Floor New Song Of The Day: Lambchop – The Last Benedict

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With a new album just around the corner, here is an intriguing new song from Lambchop.

The song is The Last Benedict and it seems Kurt has taken things in an interesting new musical direction. Listen to the tune and read the record company blurb:

Lambchop’s new album, Showtunes, arrives this Friday, May 21. Having already shared lead single “A Chef’s Kiss” and the highly imaginative, immersive film for “Fuku,” the band follows up today with a visual for new single “The Last Benedict.” As spectral snippets of opera flit in and out of the gently swelling production, “The Last Benedict” is the clearest demonstration yet of the way Lambchop has turned the distant idea of “show tunes” into something completely original and beautiful.

Speaking of the track, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner says:

At the breakfast buffet table in a hotel during the Pickathon Festival, I was “lucky” enough to get the last eggs Benedict of the service. One sad egg. Later, I caught the final scene in Giant, the one after the brawl in the diner where a battered but bemused Rock Hudson looks across the table at his grandson and says something akin to “the last Benedict.” Much later, I was sitting on my back porch and wrote this song.

In late 2019, as he has done so many times throughout his varied and fascinating career, Kurt Wagner was experimenting with something new, something that would eventually reveal itself as Lambchop’s Showtunes.

By taking simple guitar tracks and converting them into MIDI piano tracks, “Suddenly I discovered I could ‘play’ the piano,” he says. “It was a revelation that from those conversions, I was able to manipulate each note and add, subtract, arrange the chords and melody into a form that didn’t have any of the limitations I had with my previous methods of writing with a guitar.”

Removing these limitations led to a surprising new sound, something akin to show tunes but with edges burnished and viewed through Kurt’s own specific lens. “In general, it’s a genre I was none too fond of,” he admits, “with the exceptions of a few Great American Songbook–type of stuff or some of the works of artists like Tom Waits or early Randy Newman or even Gershwin or Carmichael. I’d always wanted to make songs with a similar feel, but my skills were limited until now.”

Pick up your copy of Showtunes on CD, LP, and limited-edition translucent orange Peak Vinyl in the Merge store and participating record shops. Also available in the Merge store: the official Lambchop Showtunes dog calendar which spans June 2021–June 2022 and features album cover model Rookie and other pups from the extended Lambchop family.

Marty Duda
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