One of the niftier things that happens on the county-wide web is that some folks have – on their own, mind you – made videos for songs of ours. I guess that happens for every band, but we still think we’re special. It’s a mid-life hormonal thing. Like our hot flashes.

But this is a video for the song Per Second Second from the Meadowlands that a young man named John Liang made a couple years back with his company Discreet Films.

By that time though, our website was a semi-abandoned electronic shipwreck, and we were entering the shadowy waters of another ‘self-questioning period’. With snacks.
Ok, actually we really just had a lot of shows abroad that year or something and so had stopped posting here so much, so the video never had a proper unveiling.

Somewhat unrelatedly, hearing the song again for the first time in the longest-of-asses time, it reminds me that one of the goals for this version of the song was to flip-flop the lead & back-up vocals, so that you’d really only hear the back-ups and that hopefully, that would be enough to drive the song, leaving the lead vocal inaudible except on headphones.

Still not sure that the back-ups are up to the task but the lead – you say you want that inaudible except in headphones? Can do.
It actually is in there though and the lyrics can be read & heard, translated from the original Middle English, here.

But so without further hubbub, belatedly, John Liang’s video for Per Second Second.
Thanks again, John.
Total love for the genie.

So like we’d said a couple weeks back, we did finally got together, all four of us, in the basement, first time in about 10 years et cetera, et cetera....on January 19th (that's 2009, by the by). And we'd asked our friends Joe Centeno, formerly of the band Plug Spark Sanjay, and Patrick Glennon to take some video & photos, respectively.

We were really just expecting Joe to edit together footage of us putting this first song together and that we'd be depicted in the usual older-drunk-uncles-at-a-wedding style that we've been accustomed to.

Instead, in one day, he turned out an actual bonafide music video and thus, we look cooler than we actually are.

You can relive that magical January evening here on our new foncy ponts YouTube channel, where we’ll be posting more filmic crap as we move along:

In our ‘about the film-makers’ section…clips from the documentary that Joe’s currently making on self-taught outsider artists can be seen here.

And the still photos in the video were taken by Patrick Glennon and his other
musician pix are here.

Thanks again, young art-men.

Howdy,

Someone was good enough to bring to our attention that there's been a glitch in our massive merch shopping annex that would not allow the purchase of the Abbey Road t-shirt, displaying a 'this item does not ship to the U.S.' message. (again, thanks for the alert, Greg Jackson).

Despite how it would appear, South Jersey didn't finally secede from the union or even from North Jersey. And it's not that we don't accept shady U.S. PayPal accounts or ship to your exotic distant country in the Americas. Just a wee snafu in the admin panel, now fixed and the person responsible, dismissed.
Our apologies if this delayed your giving us money to clothe you.

On a related note, auditions for drums commence this weekend.

Or began, actually. As foretold in our mini-comeback-from-the-comeback-that-was-the-meadowlands post a week or so ago, we did in fact convene in our newly much-improved basement studio last week for our first ‘real’ recording w/ all four of us since…well, the last year that ended in a ‘9’.

Well ok, not counting last winter’s abbey road song that we released last week. That was more of a lark, whereas this is the start of (a least a little bit of) real work in the basement.

So we’d figured we’d post whatever muzak we were able to scrap out of the first get-together and the folks at MAGNET have been kind enough to offer to debut it (you can listen to or download the song here.

It’s part of a recurring piece called the Wrens Watch that MAGNET has been running over the last month or so to coincide with their daring headfirst leap into the late-‘90s end of the pool with their new
‘MAGNET Web Site – Now With html’.

Now, the idea of a Wrens Watch sounds flattering at first – and we were – but the whole thing pretty quickly devolved into a fictionalized conversational j’accuse/name-calling between Eric (from MAGNET) and Charles (from us). An excerpt:

ERIC: I’m waiting.

CHARLES: Waiting for what?

ERIC: ….For your apology, Charles. What do you think?

CHARLES: Hold on a fucking sec. You said you were gonna apologize.

ERIC: No I didn’t. Fine, don’t apologize for being a jerk. But you can apologize to your fans for taking so long between albums. I mean, the first seven-year gap between records was kind of endearing and cute. This one is just kind of pathetic and sad.

CHARLES: You mean pathetic and sad like it taking MAGNET until almost 2009 to have something that resembles a real fucking website? Welcome to the ’90s, douchebags.

ERIC: You kiss your son with that mouth? You probably do, because I can certainly see that you aren’t using that mouth to sing any new Wrens songs.

Yikees. It continues on in much the same vein and while it is pretty funny, Charles doesn’t even know some of those words let alone use them in polite discourse. The actual conversation went something more like:

ERIC: Hey, man, how are you?
CHARLES: Good, good. Thank you so much for asking. How is your wife?
ERIC: Good, good. I was just thinking about you and wanted to check in.
CHARLES: That’s so nice. I understand and reciprocate fully. May the good Lord bless you and keep you as his own.
ERIC: And you as well.


See? Not as good a read. But you know, if it helps MAGNET get a third or fourth subscriber to their RSS feed, we’re only too happy to help.

Anyway…the song itself. We’re still not quite up & running in the studio yet so it’s another “Hey, I’ve got a song, it’s in D” number. All the instruments are in one room blaring into each other’s mics, there was no line check, no one brought the Sousaphone pickup. That kind of thing.
We did have some friends shoot some pictures and make a wonderful video to mark the occasion so we’ll be putting that up a little later in the week.

More to come & thanks as always,
the wrens

from the wrens Edit Desk 1/13/09:

Sorry, we should have made clear – the WorldSpace Session at Abbey Road thing (i.e. the new single, “pulled fences”) was recorded last February of 2008.

Kev’s demo for the song, which came out in Oct. as ‘In Turkish Waters’ for the ‘Fakebookshelf’ issue of the Lifted Brow, was actually recorded later, last spring or summer.

The funny part here is that we didn’t mention the date initially because we were embarrassed to reveal that it took almost a year to put out a song that took 5 minutes to record.

sorry for the confusion and thanks, as always,

the wrens
keeping folks waiting…since 1989

Howdy,

Hope your holidays were good. Heck, it’s been so long since we reached out from our hiding cave deep inside Mt. Winner (or even appeared in public, released new muzak, took a band photo...), we hope your ’90s were good.
(Is this viewable on your Mosaic browser? Is there still a spoken-word tent on the Lollapalooza tour this year? We tried calling your Iridium phone but got your machine.)

Timing being all, we patiently waited, wanting to synch our reentry to active indie rock with a worldwide economy primed to the absolute peak of its consumer-spending power.
(I’m about one phone bill away from standing on our corner with a cup in one hand and mp3’s in the other).

In spite of that, I think it’s looking to be a good year for us. To quote an email just gotten from the lovely & talented Chris Mills, 2009: the Year of Doing Stuff.
Us too, Chris.

20th Anniversary Gift: China

First of all, 2009 marks our 20th year as a band. Shocking, I know.
But, in with one Bush and out with the other, I always say.

Our First New Song Recording in 10 Years

Secondly, we have a new song just released last Thursday, “Pulled Fences”, that we recorded live at Abbey Road studios for a live radio/internet broadcast called the WorldSpace Sessions at Abbey Road (WorldSpace who are, as a sign of the times, now in Ch. 11 bankruptcy (did I mention “Bush” or “out” at all yet?)).

“Pulled Fences” marks it’s own anniversary for us – the first time in 10 years that the four of us were in one room working on new music together (Jerry’s drums for the meadowlands having been tracked in spring of ’99, he was then free to live out the remainder of the next four years as a father, husband and bread-winner).

The recording itself was also something of a low-wire act in that it’s a song of Kev’s that none of the rest of us had ever heard or played before. So what you hear on the single is us - also hearing the song for the first time - trying to fake-up some coherent parts while scrutinizing chords scribbled on notepaper like unprepared schoolchildren on test day, all while wearing ill-fitting – yet stylish - headphones.
That it came out even half-ok, you’re also hearing us getting lucky.

(I think you’re also hearing some made-up lyrics, but what do I know.)

You can buy it and read more about it (and our sad pact to make up a song on the spot should we ever hit big-time network tv) here.
We’ve even hand-made a shirt to commemorate the whole thing.

Wrens.com ended early with Buy-it-now

Then there’s the new website itself – you can read more about that and the folks who’ve helped along the way here (looking at you darling Ben Durbin).

The hilarity of replacing our old Welcome sticky with this new one is not lost on us, in that the two say almost the same thing. Some of the particulars may be different, but the objectives are all still the same, Oh and it’s two-and-a-half years later.

A lot of the site’s still under construction so watch your step. And much of what is up & running is operating at the level of the Victrola-powered chicken rotisserie in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. But like recording at home, that’s the fun of doing it yourselves.

We’ve updated the discography to include more of the old weird out-of-print stuff, brief stories about most of the records (from what we can still remember), new foncy-ponts mp3’s, lyrics, even mp3’s of computers reading lyrics . And we’ll be adding more as we move along.

All that to be followed by mountains of pointless blogging and poorly-lit band photos, to mp3’s of new songs-in-progress and live video from our basement...the usual.

New Muzak

Lastly, about that next album…all this stuff - the single, the site, the new bowlcuts – is a way for us to kick off making new music. And with all the work we’ve done behind-the-scenes in the last couple of years to change & streamline how we go about doing the poopoo that we do, there should be plenty of it. Stress ‘should’. But Kev has already demo’ed over 100 songs since we showed him that microphones are “like your ears, Kevin” last summer.

So all that’s the typically long-butted way of saying that a week from Monday – that’s the 19th – we reconvene in the basement and start recording music to follow-up the Meadowlands.
And we’ll see you in Austin in March.

Thanks as always,

the wrens

• Read more

So years upon years ago, we swore to a pointlessly bold dare that if we ever got on the Tonight Show or Letterman, we would have to make up a song on the spot – no rehearsal, no cheating, no pre-air band huddle.
This is back when Carson still hosted (Johnny not Daly) and for some reason, was our measure at the time for having ‘made it’.

As if Johnny would have waved us over to the couch to sit next to George Gobel and be congratulated on our gumption.

Cut to almost twenty years later, we’re invited to perform a few songs for something called the WorldSpace Sessions at Abbey Road.

Now, not to impugn your worldliness or hip musical knowledge (which almost certainly dwarfs ours), but Abbey Road is the studio where the Beatles made all of their records…Pink Floyd made Dark Side of the Moon, Al Stewart made “Year of the Cat”. The list goes on and on.
And to us true disciples (the Fab Forties), it’s pretty much the inner sanctum.

So we’re there, setting up, preparing to play a four-song selection of the same tired Meadowlands chestnuts we’ve been coasting on for five years now, [“…chestnuuuuuts coasting on an open fire] and it begins to sink in that we’re about to perform live on satellite radio, recording direct-to-multitrack, in front of a small studio audience...in Abbey Road.
This would clearly be the perfect time to take a page out of our old playbook and make up something new on the spot. That this would make it the first official new music in 10 years to be worked on by the four of us together, in one room (no matter how slapdash & last-minute), only clinched it.

So Kev wrote down the chords for one of his demo songs (which was just recently released as ‘In Turkish Waters’ for the Fake Bookshelf issue of the nifty Australian magazine, the Lifted Brow ), and what you hear on the single is the first run-through of a song the rest of us hadn’t heard before with guitars made up on the spot, drums, piano, singing and lyrics, all sort of improvised.

That it came out as well as it did is in large part creditable to the folks at Abbey Road, particularly Alex Scannell, who engineered, and later mixed, the track.

That it came out better than many of the songs we’ve spent months on in the past is either A. an encouraging sign of things to come this year or B. a discouraging sign we’ve squandered a lot of time & effort up to this point.

You can buy it & judge for yourself either directly from us through the built-in digital-store-widget-y thing at the bottom of this page or via the new digital upstarts itunes or Amazon.

Either way, we’ve also made up a shirt to go along with our whole Abbey-centric kick-off/we’re back theme. We make these ourselves and since this one’s 4-color and our time is worth nearly minimum wage, it’s a limited run and we’ve priced it a little more than the others. You can find that here in our store.

And here are a bunch of photos from the session. Again, not a big deal, just a big deal for us.