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bottom of the hudson

By now many of you may have heard that Trevor Butler, the bass player for Bottom of the Hudson, died yesterday, June 29th, when their tour van went off the highway following a tire blowout.

The accident also injured others including their new drummer who is in critical condition at a nearby hospital:

the story via pitchfork.

We’ve known the Bottom Of The Hudson folks for a few years now, toured with them in spring of 2004, and they’re such good, good people and wonderful musicians. Our hearts and sympathies go out to them at this terrible time.

So very sad…

Bottom of the Hudson

Bottom of the Hudson at Absolutely Kosher

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Our Four-Year, Weekends-Only Meadowlands Tour Wheezes to a Halt

After four years, some 160+ shows, roughly 10 countries, and a sultan’s variety of late-night snack foods, our four-year weekends-only tour for the Meadowlands wheezes to a halt with this weekend’s shows in Texas.

 

For details, click on the tours page right over there on the right...

 

We will have commemorative tour t-shirts coming to the site in the next couple of weeks (no, seriously) along with some other more forward-looking news and stuff.

 

For anyone that’s made the trek in the last few years to bear witness to our being our own cover band, sincere thanks. We hope we were good that night. But I do know we almost certainly had a wonderful time trying to be.

 

Sincerely,

four active seniors

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Tonight, live on the radio via the telephone

“Phoning It In’ is a nifty radio show from WMBR in Boston and WBSR in Providence where they have musicians engage in what they describe as ‘live over-the-phone performances and awkward conversation’.

Earlier last winter we did an unplugged performance on “Phoning It In” with Nadav Carmel on WMBR. It was a hoot and we definitely provided our share of awkward conversation and impossibly-long converstional pauses. And we played a few songs (we’re looking for the link for that one as we type this).

But tonight (Thursday, 5/31/07) at 9:00pm, Charles will do a few songs solo-wren-style for the partner show on WBSR with James Brandt...

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the wrens on "Fair Game"

Kind of last-minute thing, but we wrens will be playing on today’s episode of the PRI (that’s Public Radio International, NPR-listeners) show ‘Fair Game’ hosted by Faith Salie.

Wikipedia describes it thusly:

“Fair Game with Faith Salie is a satirical news and entertainment program distributed nationally on PRI. Hosted by Faith Salie, Fair Game covers the important stories of the day and uses insightful humor to tease out what it all means. The show also features newsmaker and celebrity interviews, live music and regular appearances by comedians.”

…so I gues that makes us the celebrity interview – yes!

Oh wait, we’re the live music.

And when I say ‘we wrens’ in this case, that just means two of us: Jerry was 2 over par at an important business meeting and Kev was tending to his many illegitimate children.

So check it – the vocals are iffy! The maraca playing is intermittent! The guitars sound like banjos recorded at a distance!

But we did actually have a really good time and were already fans of the show so it was very nice to be asked on. Faith is pretty hilarious.

In the Big Apple-area, it plays at 8:00 on WYNC.

Fair Game w/ Faith Salie

 

Thanks…as always

 

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Tour de Foncy Ponts

Howdy,

Maintaining our more-or-less ‘two weekends a month’ touring schedule for about the third year going now, we’ve added a peck o’new tour dates (Ohio, Georgetown, Baltimore, Seattle, Texas).

Relatedly, one-man notefest Charles is hitting the boards solo-style tomorrow night, 2/22/07. He’ll be reprising his crowd-wowing solo turn as Petruchio in ‘Taming of the Shrew’ as part of the Brooklyn Next Festival at Southpaw. Kidding – it is the Brooklyn Next Festival but he’s just playing the same tired wrens songs with loops & stuff.

Mentioning this not because it’s so great, but because it’s one-day notice at this point and the good folks of Southpaw deserve better.

Click on this funny-colored sentence to see the grueling details of our non-consecutive show dates on the ‘tours’ page

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5th Wren does London

Howdy,

For our show in London this weekend (2/17/07), the ‘5th wren’ sweepstakes (wow, that’s an ambitious term) is being run by BBC radio. So if you’re in the neighborhood and wanna try your hand at some piano, instead of our usual sign-up page, go here:

tell the BBC you wanna play piano

They’re featuring the show (which is very nice, thanks) and running the ‘5th wren’ thaaang so if you win, you’re ivory tickling is going to be recorded & broadcast…nerve-wracking, non`?

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5th wren - she sends kisses

Okey doke, here’s song/part #2. It’s the bridge piano part to ‘she sends kisses’ and although it’s not hard to play, it’s more involved and more to remember than say, the one for ‘hopeless’.

 

Taking you back to those piano lessons you crammed for right before your parents' car left the driveway for the dreaded half-hour, note that although this bridge does hit a few different keys while it lumbers along, the overall song is in F (or dm) so all those ‘B’s are flat, students!

(except in measure 7 for the G Major chord)...

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5th Wren - Hopeless

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5th Wren - Hopeless

Okey doke, so first up is an easy one – partially ‘cause we wanna start small and easy, partially ‘cause we’ve had some tech problems getting this all up online this week and partially ‘cause we haven’t figured out how we’ll work the extra on-stage guitars yet.

So this is the piano part that comes in at the end of ‘hopeless’ (track #5 on the meadowlands). Technically, it starts almost exactly at 4’:27” into the song right at the end of the last long two-part harmony held-note thing in the outro chorus although it is a little hard to hear (mixing digital piano on record not being a strong point). But it’s there...

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Esopus Event

Here are the official details for tonight’s Charles/Kevin duo show thing at the Kitchen in New York for the really wonderful biannual arts magazine, Esopus:

"AN EVENING WITH ESOPUS" AT THE KITCHEN

For its first event at The Kitchen, ESOPUS presents an evening of readings and performances whose theme—creative collaboration—is approached from four different angles by four different groups of collaborators. In "Autographs," an audio-visual presentation recorded exclusively for this event, actor/filmmaker Jennifer Jason Leigh reads a series of short poems by Vincent Katz, accompanied by projections of never-before-seen drawings by his father, artist Alex Katz. (The entire suite of 12 drawings and poems is published in ESOPUS 7.) Film production designer Thérèse DePrez ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Happiness") and cinematographer Ellen Kuras ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Unzipped") discuss with critic Amy Taubin the process of working together to create the look and tone of films like Mary Harron's "I Shot Andy Warhol" and Spike Lee’s "Summer of Sam." Playwright Christopher Durang ("Beyond Therapy," "Miss Witherspoon") stages and co-performs with actress Alma Cuervo a reading of a short parody of "Medea" that Durang co-wrote with the late Wendy Wasserstein (whose plays often featured Cuervo in starring roles). The evening ends with a set of guitar, loops, piano and vocals from Charles Bissell and Kevin Whelan from acclaimed indie band The Wrens. In keeping with the evening's theme of collaboration, their performance will include a song for which they will ask audience members to join them onstage to contribute single-note drones on extra guitars...

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Now, As For What’s Pending:

After all the catch-up news & email of the week before last, we’ll keep this as short as can be (which is to say, merely mind-bendingly long instead of actually divided into Testaments). More details to follow as each of these actually come to pass. In no particular order…

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The Meadowlands on Vinyl!! Believe...believe...

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The Meadowlands on Vinyl!! Believe...believe...

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...

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the goats of wrens past

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...

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The Picture of Little Wrens In a Prospect of Flowers: (the wrens in the Sunday New York Times)

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The Picture of Little Wrens In a Prospect of Flowers: (the wrens in the Sunday New York Times)

awwww yeah...thus spake the Gray Lady!

Back at the beginning of the summer, we had a really nice story run in the Sunday New York Times, which of course is one of those big deals so phenomenally, hilariously...um, big, that it’s almost kind of…hilarious. Maybe we should’ve mentioned it before but we’re a very conflicted people (at least about posting press stuff on the website - notice there’s currently no page for it).

Anyway, it’s funny, we’re fairly casual about a lot of this band poop – maybe too much so (hence our Tortoise career path to say, a Decemberists’ Hare). But even we recognize that you have your press – your print ‘zines, your blogs & websites etc. - and then you have the paper of record, the New York Times.

And while we’re super flattered by all of the really nice things folks have written over the last couple of years (seriously, believe me), understandably, a Times piece goes a long way toward…well, it effectively puts a comforting arm around your non-indie-rock friend or non-music-geek loved one and says, ‘Look, I’m almost a success…but I may occasionally need to borrow some money.’

Anyway, our great thanks to Tammy La Gorce at the Times for wanting to write a story about us even when there isn’t a new album to plug or anything.

Here's what the tiny-print scan of the article says....

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Video for "Boys You Won't"

This past winter, after playing a show in Birmingham (the one in England; we’re playing the one in Alabama in Sept.; we hope to get to the ones in Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois and the TWO in Indiana asap).

Sorry, anyway, after that show, a smart young man named Peter Butler approached us about doing a video for our song, ‘boys you won’t’.

This is that video.

Basically, we really do encourage listener-made videos. If you bother to do all that work, really, the very least we can do is put it up on our website and let folks see it.

 

So thanks again, very much, Peter.

Someone get the lights…

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Charles solo residency at Knit continues…

Howdy,

Charles’ solo August residency thing at the Knitting Factory Tap Bar (NY) continues tonight with one of the wrens’ bestest old friends, Koester:

http://www.koesterrock.com/

And next Tuesday, 8/29, with Roman Kuebler (from the Oranges Band) and John Ralston:

http://www.theorangesband.com/

http://www.myspace.com/johnralston

For both shows, it’s $8 to get in the door, those doors open at 7:00, and the show you’re paying for starts at 8:00.

http://www.knittingfactory.com/

These solo thingies of his are definitely not ‘acoustic’ – more like a bunch of loops, pedals and an ill-chosen set-list of older weirder wrens songs (no turntables although there is a microphone).

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the wrens vs. they might be giants

In 1986, They Might Be Giants released their first album (I bought a copy! It came on a spool of magnetized wire. See, it was a long time ago...).

Anyway, a scant three years later, the wrens started making vastly inferior pop noises in front of microphones and TMBG are to be held at least partially responsible.

Now, lo these many years later, our friend David Miller has put together a They Might Be Giants tribute album (yeah, we know, another tribute. But this one’s actually really pretty darned good. Check out the Receptor song, for starters).

It’s called ‘Hello Radio: the Songs of They Might Be Giants’ and the running order looks something like this:

1) Self- ana ng

2) The Long Winters- pet name

3) David Miller- narrow your eyes

4) Charles Douglas- she's an angel

5) Frank Black- road movie to berlin

6) The Wrens- they'll need a crane

7) Steve Burns- dead

8) OK Go- letterbox

9) Recepter- boat of car

10) This Radiant Boy- don't let's start

11) Jason Trachtenburg- doctor worm

12) Fluid Ounces- it's not my birthday

13) Brett Kull- another first kiss

14) Hotel Lights- the end of the tour

Notice anything? I mean, besides that Self, the Long Winters, Frank Black and a bunch of others are on there? That’s right, kitty cats, us too. And besides being super happy with the whole thing, it also makes this the fourth official new recording we’ve done since we finished the meadowlands 20 or 30 years ago (the others being one of the bonus tracks on the meadowlands U.K./Euro version, one song on the Five Mod Four split, and a song we did for a friend’s wedding).

Progress came quicker to the Middle Ages.

Anyway, fittingly, it’s just been released on Bar/None Records, the label that released all those early TMBG albums. And that also means that 14 or 15 years after sending our demo to Bar/None, we’ve finally been signed!

Ok, we’re kidding around but we really did send a demo back then and it really does mean something cool to us now to be on a Bar/None album of some sort.

Bar/None Records

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Video for "She Sends Kisses"

Way back in September of last year, Jason Sievers, a wonderfully talented animator in Boise, Idaho, emailed us and asked if we’d be interested in

doing a video for one of the songs from our hit album, ‘Frampton Comes Alive’.

 

After clearing up misunderstandings, Jason spent the better part of this last year working on a stop-motion animated video for ‘she sends kisses’ (like a lot of us, he does this on the side, around the job & family stuff).

 

Anyway, without much further ado, here’s Jason’s video...except to say, be sure to check out his website where you can see others he’s done for the Posies, Built to Spill and a bunch of really nice others. Oh, and don’t miss the Devil cartoons:

http://www.hardmath.net/

 

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Charles solo benefit show added for this weekend...

But grim reaper willing, charles will be playing solo on Saturday in Brooklyn at a benefit show for Emergency Communities, a relief organization based in Brooklyn, NY and Arabi/New Orleans, LA who continue to provide community-based relief (meals, medical care, legal advice & education) following Hurricane Katrina.

Their website sums up their mission statement far better than we ever could:

http://www.emergencycommunities.org/

Doors are at 8PM (music starts at 9pm. Free beer from 9:00 – 10:00 courtesy of Greenpoint Beer Works). It’s $20 to get in but with all proceeds going directly to Emergency Communites’ efforts to help rebuild the Gulf Coast.

The venue: www.supremetradingny.com213 N 8th st, Williamsburg, Brooklyn,just three blocks from the Metropolitan stop on G train (the L is not operating this weekend. Surprise).

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Charles solo show cancelled for 7/20/06

Howdy,

 

Just a quick last-minute kind of thing: Charles’ solo show originally set for tonight, 7/20/06, at Pianos in New York, NY has been cancelled. Pedalboy apparently has a cold/flu thing that’s almost certainly a result of his combination iffy hygiene and

all-candycane diet.

 

He is wracked by Catholic guilt at canceling though and urges anyone within the sound of this email and the Lower East Side to hit Pianos at around 8:30 to catch our pals, the Bon Savants. They’re a wonderful band from Boston who deserve a whole lot better than being on a bill with charles.

 

http://www.pianosnyc.com/

 

http://www.bonsavants.com/flash.html

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