Famous Lunch by Chris Acker

Chris Acker’s latest collection of songs, Famous Lunch is, in his words, a “growing pains album.” When writing the record, Acker found himself hunting for a voice that wasn’t just an imitation of the one he’d been using on the last 30 songs he’d made. “At the same time, I worked hard to find a certain voice for myself over the previous 3 records and I didn’t want to abandon that.”

While the album finds him continuing to transcribe life’s fleeting and provocative banalities with refreshing grace, the songs on Famous Lunch are intentionally more absurd, stylizing his lyricism as both poetic and disarming simultaneously— commencing with “Shit Surprise”—an earworm with a vernacular that stays true to its title. Inspired by George Saunders and Sasha Pearl (and wanting to make a song that sounds like Eagles saying the word “shit” over and over), “Shit Surprise” is the most Chris Acker song possible, in that its earnestness arrives in spades and comes varnished with a one-of-a-kind, spectacular gnarliness. “We’d match our breath in the upstairs room and we’d hold together ‘til I smelled like you,” Acker sings, before nose-diving into that unforgettable chorus about stepping in a smelly, disgusting pile of shit.

“It was definitely the first record I had to make while working and trying to be a real musician,” he says. Across the record’s 10 songs, Acker is joined by his Growing Boys bandmates Zach Thomas (bass), Nikolai Shveitser (pedal steel), Dave Hammer (guitar, vocals), Sam Gelband (drums, vocals), and Howe Pearson (piano). They made the album in December 2023 in the same place where their debut Re-Runs was recorded on a reel-to-reel more than seven years ago. “It’s a fun full-circle moment,” Acker says. “We really wanted to do another fully live record in that room, but, we’re a way different band now, so it was especially cool.”

Many of these 10 songs are about an appreciation for closeness, no doubt a product of Acker having written many of them in pieces while on the road and during a two-week residency in Butte, Montana in the spring of 2023. On a track like “Swimming in My Calvin’s,” Acker takes a pause from musing about making swimtrunks out of underwear to meditate on the intimate warmth shared between lovers (“When I come home and lay down and you turn your body into me, I hold you below your belly button and you make the softest sound”). Album centerpiece “Wouldn’t Do For You (Buddy)” Acker sings about “drawing my finger along your spine, crossing the room in your underwear” and a face next to a candle that looks like “a corner house under turning headlights.”

Though none of the songs on Famous Lunch came to Acker in a dream like “If I Needed You” did to Townes Van Zandt, the music sounds like the environment it was composed in: in-between self-booked gigs and late-night crashes on cross-continent couches, with different routines in different cities for years. When Acker sings about “doing dishes in the glow” or “follow[ing] whims like birds carry seeds” or “the inevitable ever when we’re no longer together,” you can hear the pages and pages of Moleskin journals being ripped through. He calls it “frankensteining” songs, the act of cobbling together memories—both drunken ramblings and clear-eyed yearnings—into poems with new lifespans, tape-hiss fadeouts, and plucky introductions.

Famous Lunch contains some of his best work yet (“Stubborn Eyes,” “Wouldn’t Do For You (Buddy),” “Eyelash”) and some raucous, bar-ready new joints (“Don’t You Know (Who I Think I Am),” “Cursive Proverbs”). Caught someplace in-between the cowboy laments of Jerry Reed and the tender-hearted annals of Gram Parsons, Acker puts his world on a clothesline and lets it dry out in the sun. Famous Lunch is full of confusion and fragility, but it’s also full of love not taken for granted and a profoundly familiar ache for domesticity and a clock turned backwards.

But, more than anything else, Famous Lunch finds Chris Acker at his most sentimental and grateful, as he sings about Bunn coffee machines, gas pumps smelling like “the underside of a fingernail” in August, “10-inching” bread, stealing country club lawn-mower motors, father-son fables, impatient buffet lines, and a broom that “hasn’t been used since the last time I used it.” Acker’s eye for detail remains, and his lexicon includes phrasings that spin out like a hypnotic wash cycle (“quiet as putting in a bookmark,” “these parentheses around our smiles,” “fall asleep in a crooked shape”). Seeing the world through his eyes, language remains something worth falling into—growing pains and all.

Chris Acker is originally from Washington state but spends most his time writing songs in New Orleans and performing with the Growing Boys

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