Hey, saw the light on, thought I'd drop by
One of the stranger (but occasionally cooler) aspects about being a long-lived but less-than-prolific band that makes it to near-2010 (and with a slow-but-working internet connection) is that online, your older albums never die, they just continue to pop up here & there like that person from accounts payable you made out with at last year’s office holiday party. Or say, the undead. Not necessarily out to do harm or even embarrass, but making things kinda weird just by being there.
And people send you links to see it happen.
With our last album having come out in ‘03, we’re not exactly generating a hipster’s-weight-in-gold’s-worth of press lately. So it’s a really nice surprise - and a super flattering one as well – to find out some folks had put the Meadowlands on their Best-of-Decade lists of varying sizes (theoretically I guess, if the lists were long enough, we’d be on all of them. Like say, Top 110,343 Albums of the Decade).
Now, we should preface all this by adding that we’re kind-of of a mixed mind about posting this type of thing - notice we don’t have a press/reviews page. But making this dumb album almost killed me/us and the work that went into it & the depression that came out of it, dwarfed the small-beans industry setbacks that have become something of our ‘story’ (but more on that some other time).
So this means more to us than you might think and figure if you’re here reading this, we're counting you in on whatever modest successes we have and so wanna share our good luck & news and say thank you.
And lest you still think we take all this (or ourselves) a tad too serious, probably worth a quick revisit to what I wrote about one of our own early heinous band photos (as opposed to our more recent heinous band photos).
That said...
behold this, our self-tooted horn
We just squeaked in on Stereogum’s Gummy Awards list of top 50 albums of the decade at, well, #50. But this one means the most to us because it’s a readers’ poll and sort of boggles our micro-sized brains that there are enough readers that would vote our album up there esp. given how many great albums there have been in the last 10 years (a point driven home by looking at lists like these). But so, dear readers, thanks very much.
John Richards & DJ Shannon at KEXP also put the Meadowlands in their respective top 10’s . You’d think being dj’s they’d have better record collections. Seriously, KEXP have been awfully kind to us and are super nice folks, so thank you, John & Shannon. Our “pledge checks” are in the mail.
The following three were nice ‘cause we found them ourselves since they’re on blogs I/we actually already subscribe to via the moderny miracle time-suck of RSS. Both Oceans Never Listen and Heeb magazine put the meadowlands in their ten-year top-10s and as the friend who forwarded the Heeb link said, “it’s almost as good as being Jewish”. But actually, as a band we’re ¼ Jewish, ‘Bissell’ is a Yiddish word meaning ‘bit or piece’ and our label is Absolutely Kosher.
At this point we’re considering a run for the Knesset.
And in lieu of long lists, An Aquarium Drunkard has been doing sort of re-reviews of albums of the last 10 years, and were very kind on our sole aughts output.
Lastly, a couple blogs who gave us album of the decade. Just even typing that sentence seems crazy but hey, it’s your list. So truly, our sincere thanks to Thus Spake Drake and Babystew.
Again, hopefully this didn’t come off as braggy, it’s more that to not acknowledge these and say thanks would seem rude. And for us, it’s a wonderful way to finish out 2009 and as our master plans come to final fruition, we should have something new in 2010 to hopefully get all listy about.
Until then, as always, our humble & sincere thanks,
The wrens