Started a “here’s what I did in the last 10 years” post but almost everything that came to mind initially was from the previous decade. So typically hilariously late, here’s my 2000-2010 nutshell:
I had my first non-teaching-music office job - and so, my first health insurance!, regular payroll check, etc. - which was awesome…
Last Thursday, July 31st, was a another unlikely milestone for us: the 25th anniversary of our very first show, at a club long-since gone on 42nd St., Manhattan, right next to the Port Authority. And even though there were a few hasty rehearsals first, it being the first time of many that we powered up amps & attempted to 'wow' the non-crowd (also first of many), we count it as the official starting gun.
And typically late to everything, including watch-bestowing self-ceremonies we hold every five years to congratulate ourselves on being even later to breaking up, we didn't get around to posting anything. Heck, I only noticed because I set a calendar alarm. Four years and 364 days ago. [READ ON]
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...
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...
Here are the hastily-assembled details for our 20th Anniversary shows tonight & tomorrow.we’ll be joined by our old friends (literally), 12:01. We played with them exactly 20 years ago when we both just starting out in southern New Jersey.
And per voting consensus, our set list will be some kind of re-ordering of these old chestnuts...
Charles has given new meaning to the old sexist phrase ‘nice knobs’. It now means ‘knees’. He’s also going a little heavy on the “She Blinded Me with Rest-stop Sunglasses and Short-Pants” and looks, not so much further back in the photo, as he does much, much smaller than everyone else.
As if Kevin’s imagining him...
But yeah, according to our best guesses, Kev’s Tawny-Kitaen-A-Day planner, and a hurried but
to-scale rebuild of Stonehenge, we’re able to verify with almost penpoint accuracy that it was exactly twenty years ago today, July 31st 1989, that we played our first show as a band. Sweet holy crap.
Sure, there were a few rehearsals before that and sure, we weren’t called the wrens then, and sure, it was performed on the then-popular lutes with sackbut accompaniment, but it was our first show nonetheless. And it probably sucked.
If you’ve ever perused our bio, (a light bullet-point read with an update pending since 2002),