To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown — the seventeenth album by beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop, 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 that 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.From Wagner:it seemed perfect in the moment.a chorus of singers revealing the raw beauty and power of the human voicewith its unique varieties.its unadorned simplicity gave weight to the words as they were sung.i wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music.Working again with guitarist Andrew Broder, Wagner went back to writing songs the way he did when he started out. Of the dozens of songs Wagner and Broder wrote, 30 were considered, and 12 became Punching the Clown. The voice lining out those songs, unmistakably, is Wagner’s. Responding to his call: Broder (guitar), Justin Vernon (banjo), an Eau Claire-based choir put together by Blake Morgan, The Bible producer Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs), and engineer Mark Nevers (Silver Jews, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), recording and mixing his first Lambchop album since 2012’s Mr. M.The result is graceful, generous, sometimes wry and sometimes heartbreaking, unblinkingly idiosyncratic yet precise as cut glass. How else can one describe Punching the Clown, beyond Wagner’s own exegesis?From Wagner:It’s the darndest thing.let’s just say i tried for simple, restrained vocabulary to get closer to amodest amount of truth through a guise of hyper-naturalism grief love andhumor.