On Wed October 06, 2010 Charles will be playing in Brooklyn, NY at the Rock Shop.
More about the show...
Howdy,
charles will be playing a solo show at the Rock Shop in Brooklyn, next Wed., Oct. 6th opening up for our dear pal Tim Kasher, who’s usually fronting a little band called Cursive, but currently hitting the highway supporting his new solo album, the Game of Monogamy (which is wonderful, by the way).
Charles will be hacking his way through some new songs demo’d or on the drawing board for the next Wrens album as well as his usual Sultan’s variety of bad effects pedal choices and looping and studio trickery. Maybe a cover song too…possibly a new shirt…
Believe it or not
have written & demo’d about a dozen new songs in the last month (one of them nearly above average) and that’s just me (me being Charles). And that's even working around the arrival of Heir #2, who frankly, even for a minus-two-week-old, hasn't lifted a finger to help with the band [edit.: Press photo not avail. Older brother pictured w/ relevant record-o headgear]...
...Dear New Orleans benefit comp released today...
Just a little reminder that the Dear New Orleans benefit album is released today via your preferred places of musical e-commerce (iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and eMusic) and includes our song Crescent from our own forthcoming album. You can read tons about it here (or just hit the “page down” button).
...& debut performance of Crescent w/ Bird of Youth tonight
It’s been five years
To mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina - and in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster also deeply affecting the region – the folks at Air Traffic Control have produced “Dear New Orleans”, a digital-only benefit compilation, the proceeds of which will be granted to a range of New Orleans-based nonprofit organizations including Sweet Home New Orleans and Gulf Restoration Network.
To do our tiny part, we have a new song, “Crescent”, included on “Dear New Orleans” which will be released & available for download on Tuesday, August 24th..
Long Live the King!
About halfway through the four-year Gallipoli that was making the Meadowlands, we moved from Ft. Lee, NJ back to yet another house in Secaucus, our third there. On the first full weekend in the new place, I was home by myself cleaning up in the yard, trying to hide from neighbors that a band had moved in next door, the kiss of suburban death.
One of those neighbors, the one directly next door, came over from his yard, introduced himself as Dan and asked the general niceties you do when you meet someone who’s renting (us) the house next to the house that you own (him), raised children in, have a real stake in etc. and need to take a measure of the person the fates have cast in the role of new neighbor and adjust the new threat-to-peace-of-mind level accordingly.
Now I admit...
Oh yeah, oh yeah...
..forgot to mention, the working title of the next record is "funeral".
Actually not kidding. Or if so, more in an Erased DeKooning sorta way...
…to the “making the record and the making of the making of the record” post
Ok, my gaze into the crystal ball of productivity may have been a little rosey, but not by too much. Our muzakal work-weekend started Thursday night greeting Peter, the fellow coming in from Texas to document our musical ‘leavings’, and set up for Friday. That’s standard beginner band checklist stuff by now: buy guitar, write songs, engage services of band in-house cinematographer, play first show…
I know, I know
…it's never clear - are they recording, are they not recording, they’re calling these two shows a tour but they’re always playing two shows, are two of them brothers or were they married or what…
...our second four-wren get-together in 10 days with new songs of Kevin’s & Greg’s gone over.
Back at home, Charles continues to be on veritable fire writing & recording (5 songs in the last week and a half).
Really, all around a red-letter week or so for the veterans and our most productive 10 days since our seminal work on quantum theory in the ‘20s. ..
You know how it is, life takes you where it does, and some of us just aren’t lucky enough to have it drop our boat on the shores of either Lake Philadelphia or the Baltimore Sea (unusually for me, that’s not sarcasm. I’m originally Philadelphian (more or less) and we’ve got a soft spot in our shared Jarvik 7 of a band heart for Baltimore, having played over 35,000 shows there, going back to Jerry’s college years at nearby State U.)...
Maybe “national” is a stretch. Ok, even “tour” is a stretch. But with two consecutive nights’ shows booked for the first time in at least one SXSW ago, (Philadelphia, May 21st at the First Unitarian Church and Baltimore, May 22nd at Sonar), this, for us, constitutes a tour...
As mentioned last week, we’re playing as part of a larger benefit show for Haiti, and details (as well as tickets) are available today.
The show is Wednesday, January 27th, at the Bell House in Brooklyn, doors open at 6:00, and 100% of the proceeds will be split between Save the Children and Partners in Health.
All sets are short, stripped-down affairs and we should be on about 9:15 or so. Although with a line-up like this, it’s worth making a full evening of it...
By now, most of us have seen the heartbreaking scenes of destruction, suffering and death coming from Haiti, following the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck there at 4:53pm local time, January 12th, approximately 10 miles from Port-au-Prince. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people are feared dead, as the capital city has been devastated.
To do our small part in helping to raise money for this cause, we’ll be performing at a benefit show here in New York City, along with a handful of other musicians, and we’ll post details on that as they’re finalized in the next day or two.
When disasters of this magnitude occur, sometimes amidst the media coverage and discussion, it can be less clear to know where to go to help or to donate the much-needed money for relief and eventual recovery...
Decennially means every 10 years, which isn’t accurate, I just wanted to type it...
B-B-B-B…But so where does that leave us?
So although we haven’t started new recording yet (I know, I know, believe me), in a very real way, we’ve never been more ahead or more prepared. Or had more plans or ideas. Weird, I know, but sometimes such are one’s middle years....
Again, we don't have a press page and have always been iffy about putting up a whole page of flattering press (also too lazy to go ahead and write that press ourselves). But we were so knocked out that some people had put the Meadowlands on their lists of favorite albums of the decade that that we went ahead and broke our own little convention here and then again here when someone pointed out that we'd hilariously missed Pitchfork...
[approaches dais, clears throat]
"Thank you, shareholders and thank you to our parent company, Berkshire Hathaway. During this last fiscal year…well, you’ve probably read in the trade & industry journals that our cutting-edge R&D team is well under way with new product development and recording and…well, this is Wrens & Co. Inc. LLC and we will mic no drum before its time. So yeah, we both aren’t and we are..."
Even by our time-tunnel wrens calendar, where months pass like days and days pass like picoseconds, 2009 came in like a lion and went out like another lion in a hell of a hurry, kind of pooping on our plans while it did...