With a scant 13 years since our first & last vinyl release (the Low 7"), we're practically giddy as 30-year-olds to announce and introduce you all to the special edition double-lp vinyl version of The Meadowlands complete w/ 4 bonus tracks (special edition double-lp vinyl version of The Meadowlands complete w/ 4 bonus tracks meet the public….public meet the special edition double-lp vinyl version of The Meadowlands complete w/ 4 bonus tracks. I’m headed to the wine bar).
That’s right, an actual vinyl record album. A double one, no less.
It’s funny, probably because of how old we are, and that our formative records were all bought, well, as ‘records’ not cd’s (Bram Tchaikovsky, anyone?), this is a big deal for us. Even after three-and-a-half official cd’s, it almost feels like, ‘finally, we’ve put out an album!’
Anyway, here’s the running order:
Side A:
1. The House That Guilt Built
2. Happy
3. She Sends Kisses
4. This Boy Is Exhausted
Side B:
5. Hopeless
6. Faster Gun
7. Thirteen Grand
8. Boys, You Won’t
Side C:
9. Ex-Girl Collection
10. Per Second Second
11. Everyone Choose Sides
12. 13 Months In 6 Minutes
Side D:
13. This Is Not What You Had Planned
14. Such A Pretty Lie
15. Nervous And Not Me
16. Our Brightest New Year
17. Splitter #7: Fireworks / James, I Wanna
Now, as to those four bonus tracks…working backward, the splitter (track 17) appeared on a 7” we put out on Saddle Creek, oh about 10 years ago, with Park Ave. Almost all of the members of Park Ave. have gone on to bigger things (Bright Eyes, the Faint, Tilly & the Wall), while we rehash our past output and sit in wicker porch rockers staring at pictures of ourselves with hairlines.
We called this ‘splitter #7’ not because it was a split-7” single but because it’s two songs in one – a different song out of each speaker (‘fireworks’ on L, ‘james, I wanna’ on R…I think) - and this was the seventh of those we did apparently. There’s also one on ‘Secaucus’ (‘destruction/drawn’), a few unreleased from around ‘Silver’, a few cassette-only bla bla bla. Every so often we talk about doing a whole album of them at some point, but don’t hold any breath.
‘Our Brightest New Year’ was from a 7” we put out on Mike Hibarger’s Sonic Bubblegum label out of Boston back in what, 1970? Ok, maybe 1995. Three cheers for Mike!
‘Nervous and Not Me’ and ‘Such a Pretty Lie’ were both supposed to be on the original Meadowlands album. They were two of the last songs under construction right before we had the final mastering session in early 2003. But then we had an oddly-coincidental string of deaths in our respective families and so work on those songs came to a quick end & any planned revisions stayed on the drawing board.
At that time, ‘Nervous…’ was finished & mixed in its original form but just left something to be desired. So last winter, in prep for the Euro release of the album, we wrote a new chorus chord progression, recorded new guitars & bass for it and here you have it – the first new music (besides the TMBG tribute) we’ve done since the Meadowlands.
Serves 3-4. Enjoy.
It is something of an understatement though to say that it was odd going back and working on a meadowlands song again – like the album had never ended.
Dear Meadowlands, please end.
With ‘..pretty lie’, the bonus track is the best existing mix of this 2nd or 3rd version of the song – also from back in January 2003. This was actually the song that was being worked on when work came to an end and right as we finished this particular mix, on literally the last note, the tape twisted and was eaten up by the machine (thank you once again, ADATs).
So that, combined with the material lost w/ in the ‘erase the master tapes’ party, meant there was simply nothing left of this song to go back and work on now short of starting over. So here it is…in hindsight, not bad.
A very special set of blessings go from us wrens to the other wrens (we rarely thank ourselves), the macher-y AbKosh in Berkeley, the wundervoll BB*Island in Hamburg and the fab LO-MAX Records in London for putting this all together and getting it out the door with us.
You can get your hands on one at our little corner of on-line retail paradise that is the wrens store:
We’ll also have them at shows….