Punching the Clown

To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown – the seventeenth album by beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop, out August 21, 2026 on Merge Records and City Slang – began as a ghost hunt. After hearing a song on the radio while driving one night – “a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices” – he went looking for it and failed. In his pursuit, he discovered “lined-out singing, ” a form of acapella call-and-response gospel singing that began in Scotland in the 1800s and became a root of American gospel and country music when Scottish immigrants settled in Appalachia. The song, typically a hymn, is led by a clerk, who begins the verse alone before a choir swells up to accompany them on the rest of the line. Lined-out singing was born out of necessity – not every member of a given congregation could read, so the clerk’s voice spurred the choir’s memory of what came next in the hymn – but it’s effect is profo