Ohio

Album: Oh (Ohio) (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This was originally a song that Lambchop pianist Tony Crow wrote for his wife. Lambchop mainman Kurt Wagner explained to The Village Voice how he transformed it into this track: "Knowing that it was like a Valentine he had written to his wife, I sort of would sort of piece together these little images of what maybe his marital bliss is all about. And so I have this sort of domestic imagery in my mind and I just sort of would cherry-pick ideas from that. Whether it was: his wife makes his lunch and she puts his name on the bag; or she puts his kids' name on the lunch bag. I don't know. Just the morning paper, stuff like that. So it was like putting together little pieces of imagery like that and trying to find sort of a blankness of a choice of word like 'Ohio' to sort of express that. Just the sort of mood without really getting into anything too mushy."
  • Pitchfork Media asked Wagner why he titled the album Oh (Ohio). He replied: "It's just one of those instances where it fit in a nice way, but doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the record other than it's the title of the opening track."
  • Wagner explained the album cover to Pitchfork Media: "It was a painting that a professor of mine named Michael Peed had made. He was part of my graduate committee at school. In a lot of ways he was very influential in what I became as a visual artist. I had lost track of him over the years, and on the solo tour, around the time we were starting the new record, I ran into him in Barcelona. We reconnected and he came to the show, and I asked him to send me what he'd been working on lately. So he sent me a series of these paintings, which he called the Chaos and Tranquility series or something. I liked them very much, and as time went on, when I started thinking about what we would use for the record cover, it just seemed like a good idea to contact him and see if he was into letting us use a couple of those for the artwork."

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