Driving to my 6AM grocery store shifts in the summer of 2015, Mr. M was an album I frequently listened to, needing something soothing and unhurried in my state of sleepy discomfort. My brother owned this CD (good choice, bro) so I took it with me in the car, sitting in there outside ShopRite drinking my coffee, smoking a cigarette on my breaks.

I never got over the perfection of opener “If Not I’ll Just Die” (the title cribbed from Bacharach’s “This Guy’s in Love With You”). Featuring “A London String Ensemble”, this song resonates with a calm beauty while exhibiting the wry humor that’s always been a part of Lambchop’s music. Lyrically, frontman Kurt Wagner seems to exist in and outside of the song: “crazy flutes” are mentioned, but never heard. Some lines seem to trail off (“maybe blowin’ kisses, blowin’ ?”), or are cryptic – “seagulls just avoid talk about seagulls,” or simple (“clean the coffeemaker”). I used to try to write these lyrics down from memory, and I’m still mesmerized by this song.

There is a heartbroken, bittersweet quality to much of this music. Singer and friend of the band Vic Chesnutt took his own life in late 2009, and Mr. M (recorded in the two years following) is dedicated to him. A line like “loss made us idiots” reflects the mental state of the band, again with dark humor. Really I never connected the impact of that event with the making of Mr. M until now, which is to say that the gloom of loss does not overpower the music. If anything there is a healing power in its soft delivery and smooth overtures.

Seasoned players create a slow atmosphere on many of these songs (see also: Is a Woman from 2002). But the meandering 10 minutes of “Gar” and “Nice Without Mercy” set “Buttons” in high relief. “I used to know your girlfriend / back when you used to have a girlfriend,” Wagner sings amid sad memories and observations. “Now she’s had another baby / and her life has gone suburban /And I wonder what she thinks of / when she thinks back now of you.” It’s hard not to read “Buttons” as a last letter to Chesnutt.

“It’s the kind of day you never wake up from,” begins “Kind Of”. This is Mr. M‘s big tearjerker, nestled between “Betty’s Overture” and the upbeat “The Good Life (is wasted)”. “Speak now love to me of your return,” sings Wagner in front of pleading strings. It’s the most tender moment on an album from a band that is usually as aloof as it is tender. In a discography loaded with great records, this is Lambchop’s masterpiece. Mr. M is a product of grief, but in its transfusion of pain it becomes a balm in itself, a work of magic.

Listen to Mr. M here.