Kurt Wagner has announced a new Lambchop record called The Bible, out September 30th!
The Bible’s first single, the gospel-soaked 'Police Dog Blues', arrives today.
Kurt Wagner on the song:
"During the unrest surrounding the horrific injustice in Minneapolis in 2020, I had been re-listening to a song by Blind Blake, 'Police Dog Blues'. Of note, it was originally recorded in 1929, the year my father was born, and it seems John Peel played it on his show on Sept. 11, 1968. It was deceptively upbeat musically and not what I remembered at all. Then I remembered a police dog is a Shepherd."
The song's charged, striking video was generated on the Unreal 3D graphics engine and directed by Isaac Gale. Produced in virtual reality in order to achieve the most unsettling imagery, Joe Midthun used Unreal Engine and Visions of Chaos to set up events like dogs just hanging around or a tidal wave of police flowing into a suburb, and they'd hope for happy accidents from the AI. "We took the police dog from the song title literally and imagined a city, post cop-apocalypse, overrun by German Shepherds just kinda doing their thing.", says Gale, "White privilege and apathy in the face of disastrous reality. I don’t think it’s stretching it to compare the police in Minneapolis—where myself and the producers of the record, Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder, all live—to a human-made catastrophic disaster."
Speaking of the album's title, Wagner says:
"I had this idea that—I’m not a religious person but I do believe that there’s a spirituality to a lot of people and they’re not religious. You don’t have to be religious to be a spiritual person, right? You just don’t have to, there should be an acceptance, or a way of recognizing spirituality without it being overtly religious."