Howdy,
And welcome to what should be one of our last gigantic near-annual
wrap-ups. Not for any reason more dramatic than that with our new foncy ponts website, (which we’ve been away from too much to play with too much until now) it’ll be a whole lot easier for us to consistently post new stuff (videos, news, confessional tell-all blog entries, what-have-you) thereby saving the band emails for the more occasional how-do-you-do’s and important stuff and so sparing both you and your collective inboxes (servers rejoice!).
It’ll also leave us more time for working on longer and more-complex
run-on sentences.
To keep all this even a little more underwhelming, we’re splitting it into two emails (and multiple news items on the website): this one covering where we’ve been & what we’ve been up to; and another (to be posted later today), letting you all know what’s going on at the moment and what’s planned.
Ahh, so organized. Listen, children…you can almost hear the ‘unsubscribe’ buttons being hit in tandem.
But promise, these are the last of the long ones…
What’s Been Going On:
If you’re reading this from here in the U.S., it may seem like we’re coasting – almost deliberately wearing out our warm welcome from a now-three-year-old album. And you’re right.
No, no, wait…no you’re not. How dare you? How DARE you?!
Actually, we’ve been mind-bendingly busy so far in ‘06. Believe it or not, the Meadowlands only just came out in the U.K. and continental Europe this past winter & spring through the wonderful work of our label there, LO-MAX Records (hi Allison, Bernard & Katherine):
…their (and our) partner in Germany/Austria/Switzerland, BB*Island (howdy Quintus & Simone):
..and a host of distributors (Go! Entertainment, Rootsy, PIAS & Ananana in the Benelux countries, Norway, Spain & Portugal, respectively).
They’re all good folks and through their tireless efforts and proselytizing, we’ve had something like 8 or 9 wonderful weekend tours of the U.K., Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and a few weekends back, Norway. And yes, we do the weekends-only tour scheme abroad too.
Toblerone, anyone?
LO-MAX & BB*Island also went absolutely bonkers securing some really nifty press – a near embarrassment of critical riches including reviews and write-ups in Mojo, an album of the month in NME, a Sunday London Times Feature, German Rolling Stone etc. Probably the best place to see a good bit of that is here:
See what we mean? That’s really a lot of palms greased, methinks.
Now of course, the European version of ‘the meadowlands’ cd has the requisite couple of bonus tracks (more on those later).
But due to a hilarious technical mix-up of near-Gilligan proportions (‘Skipper, I thought you said cut the bamboo-bicycle-powered raft loose, THEN climb in’), the first 1000 copies of the U.K. Meadowlands were run off with different versions of the bonus songs (yes, we even have alternate versions of our bonus tracks and sometimes the mixing desk gets a little cluttered, mistakes get made).
So completists – both of you – be forewarned.
Next Up:
new & old music, some vinyl, some U.S. tour dates, some projects, some other poop….
Thanks as always,
the wrens