Today Wonder

There was a break of two years between Today Wonder and its predecessor, Everybody’s Got To. Listening to Today Wonder, you suspect Kuepper had gone through some major disarmament – the sound here is minimal, at times brittle, with only acoustic guitar, voice and Mark Dawson’s empathetic, sculptural drums. A songwriter as idiosyncratic as Kuepper is made for this kind of reduced, intimate context, and on Today Wonder, his writing is renewed – a few of his all-time classics appear here in the first incarnation, like the devastatingly affecting “Everything I’ve Got Belongs To You”, and the mysterious, alienated “Horse Under Water”. There’s also an update of his Laughing Clowns trademark, “Eternally Yours”, and Tim Hardin and Skip James covers that nestle tidily among Kuepper’s own songs. A breathtaking album, by any measure.