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]

Kevin came over last night and we lay our respective demos & full-band tracks on the table and now have a very first early glimpse of how a next album(s) might lay out, itself a first. Have I mentioned he has 100 demos? One of them is also quite good.

With the hammer finally regularly to the anvil of song-smithing, now only need to drop 15lbs, shave my head and buy a decent shirt made either within the last year or not in the last 40...and a musician I'll be. Touring back and forth between the two remaining venues of the ice-covered post-apocalyptic snow-scape of a hell frozen over…you know, because we’d have done a new album.

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...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:

Another small reminder as well that charles will be unveiling - and then probably very quickly re-veiling – our song from Dear New Orleans, Crescent, with Bird of Youth backing up tonight at week four of their August-long every-Tuesday residency at the Living Room here in New York City.

thanks as always,
the wrens

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“Crescent” Featured on "Dear New Orleans" Benefit Compilation for the Gulf

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 at the Dear New Orleans site, as well as at the usual lineup of your preferred places of digital business (iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody and eMusic.com).

Tying it all together nicely, Charles will be debuting the song the same night, Tues., 8/24, as part of Bird of Youth’s every-Tuesday-night-in-August residency at the Living Room here in NYC. The Bird of Youth players have graciously, even foolishly, agreed to be backing band for the song that night. Charles will reciprocate to completely different effect by dragging a couple of their songs (Bombs Away and a Squeeze cover) down a few drains.

About Air Traffic Control

Air Traffic Control is a nonprofit resource for activist and philanthropic musicians who along with the
Future of Music Coalition, have been co-hosting a series of artist activism retreats in New Orleans since 2006. Artists are given the rare opportunity to connect directly with the people of New Orleans, the tradition bearers and community leaders who are on the frontlines of rebuilding and sustaining this vital city.

Charles was honored to be invited to one of the retreats a couple years back and it was, without much understatement, life-changing. It also, to paraphrase Air Traffic Control’s own mission statement, instilled a sense of empowerment for what can be accomplished through activism and music.

About the Dear New Orleans comp itself:

The “Dear New Orleans” comp itself is a musically impressive affair and honestly, would be worth your tough-earned dollars even if those dollars weren’t going to worthy causes.

See the Dear New Orleans site for the stellar lineup & running order. And a free download from the comp.

About our contribution:

When ATC asked if we’d be interested in helping out, Charles had this grandiose notion of using one of his demos for our own upcoming record, writing new lyrics to reflect his experience on the ATC-sponsored NOLA retreat, the wonderful folks he met there, some of their stories, etc.
But then life intervened w/ a premature second baby so we submitted an entirely different demo of his, an early version of one of the songs for our next album. So technically, broadly-defined, a new wrens’ song…

About some of the Orgs doing the work:

Sweet Home New Orleans is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the individuals and organizations who define New Orleans’ unique musical and cultural traditions.

They began their work immediately after the levees broke in 2005 helping the New Orleans musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid & Pleasure Club members get on their feet, get to work, and revitalize their communities and the cultural economy of New Orleans. And they did this by raising & distributing over $2.5 million in financial assistance to more than 2,500 members of the city’s music community.

Gulf Restoration Network is a 16 year-old environmental group committed to uniting and empowering people to protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf of Mexico. Since the storms of 2005, they have worked for a national commitment to the restoration of the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, the region’s natural storm protection, which are disappearing at the rate of an acre an hour. The BP drilling disaster has greatly increased threats to this ecosystem, and GRN has provided independent monitoring and advocacy since the first days of the disaster.

In Sum…

We’re honored to lend the little help we can, our song in this case, to Dear New Orleans. We encourage each of you to check out this amazing compilation and do what you can to help make a difference for the Gulf Coast.
For more information on Dear New Orleans, a free download from the compilation, and to learn more about how you can help the Gulf, please visit Dear New Orleans.

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Last night...

...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.

Oh yeah, oh yeah

..forgot to mention, the working title of the next record is "funeral".

Actually not kidding.

…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…

Friday opened with classic Charlesian luck - driving to NJ, the front right tie rod of the van broke off coming into the toll plaza of the Triborough. Note to drivers: if you’re gonna lose a tie rod, the thing that connects the otherwise free-floating front wheels to the whole steering apparatus, better to do it at around 10mph than say, a life-ending 70.
The whole story is too mundane to type here, and we’ve all been down that Gilligan road before – this one ends w/ the Professor rescued off a highway island and is all on tape now anyhow. With this early-round knockout, the champ retained the title we’ve all battled over since our first German tour of the early ‘90s, Scheißebruder.

So a late start Friday, Jerry swung in from Philadelphia, we spent a few hours addressing last-minute equipment/technical needs, then ran through some songs and tracked a couple different takes each of five new ones. Or was it only four? Well to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being that these are 44-year-olds, the most powerful musicians in the world, and will blow your head…clean off…with their next rockin’ jamz, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”. Well, do ya, punk rockers?

Really, the whole weekend was so great, so productive for us and kinda felt like the old days, that everyone left feeling 75 years younger. It seems that maybe some metaphoric lever has finally been thrown and the production line is now running at full cap. – e.g Charles went home and with the family away until Sunday, wrote & recorded two more songs and fully demo’d a third. That puts him only about 122 opuses behind Kevin.

A wren may rock on the moon yet.

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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…

Ok, so, in brief, we often post (often on Facebook ) about Kevin & Greg arranging new songs into a two-man dirge wrecking crew, Jerry meeting with Kevin in the beat lab, Charles logging in some quantity time Googling mic capsules & guitar pedals, but due mostly to adulty schedules, the four of us have only gotten together twice since we kicked it off for like the third time last January – once to get drum sounds, the second time we tracked two songs’ basics.

Well, tomorrow you can bump the counter up to three, and a big three at that.

Work Personal days have been arranged, babies have been banished to in-laws, pedalboards of ridiculous complexity have been hammered together from Ikea shelving, an hilariously talented filmmaker/cinematographer has been flown in from Texas to roll film and wire the home studios with tiny cameras (the better to record our own shenanigans after his departure (see above)).

We are shit serious this time.

The work whistle sounds at 10:00am and we go until night and then another manful 6 hours on Saturday. If we don’t come out of this with at least 10 new songs basic-tracked (most of them Kevin’s, one of them good), I’ll eat the same fictional hat I trot every time I make these proclamations.

But this time I mean it, baby…

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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.

the brighter star in the firmament
Kevin has been demo-ing for the last year or two, really for the first time ever (strange as that sounds), and he’s got over 100 songs recorded, mixed, with parts and pretty xylophones and rockly operatic lyrics wherein he embodies the character known only as the Rake.
Wait, that’s not us.
But he does have 100+ demos done and one of them's quite good. No, really.

the star's mysterious brother
And he & Greg have been getting together a few nights a week for quite a while going over those songs, working out parts & variations. Greg spent more money & time getting his guitar equipment together this year than in the previous 19 band years combined (multiplied by a large-ish whole number). He’s even been taking guitar lessons for the first time so clearly, someone’s buckling down. And he’s now a dad for round two, so the buckle comes off as well, ladies.

the other one who insists on singing
Charles?...also now a parent. In his case the stay-at-home-dad kind which means only a few half-hour-naps'-worth of available band/work time each day. And even that has to be fit around swapping Bed-Stuy gossip with like-minded neighbors over one of those top-half-open barn-style backdoors like an extra on Hee-Haw.

So to better put that time towards something productive and art-like, as of today, he’s hereby relinquishing & handing off all boring band-business stuff to our new foncy ponts management (see Part 2) and is now, officially, after a false start last summer, trading his “From the Desk of Charles Dickhead” business bond laid paper letterhead (with matching band gavel), for a guitar, a carbon mic and a Non-Remy Weft hair weave to try his hand making records again. He hasn’t been this jazzed about music since he was 40 and playing in Kenton’s band.

the cuddly likable one
Jerry has this way of holding his head that looks smashing on film. So band photos should be a breeze now. In his spare time, he continues to lead the world in the production of smaller MacDonalds (currently four street models to choose from).

Resolutions and Predictions

So, for like the dozenth time, official full-band recording starts next Wednesday, January 13th, 2010, at approximately 6:00pm E.S.T. in a New Jersey basement studio not far from Rudy Van Gelder’s original Hackensack one.
And bonkers as it sounds, I’m going on record predicting that we’re mostly done with the next album by say….June.
No, this June.
I don’t blame you for not believing me, I kinda don’t. And yet, there it is. In writing, no less.

‘Cause it really is about time now. The goal is to go from being one of the least prolific bands in indie rock, to one of the most, putting out say, two albums a year ‘60s-style, and deep-sixing whatever goodwill we’ve engendered over the years by flooding the market with product. Cheap, formulaic product with a hand-applied art veneer.

Or maybe we’ll just get going and see where that takes us…

Either way, thanks as always, especially for the patience, and may your 2010 be as fruitful as we fantasize our own will be,

the wrens

[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..."

Here’s what we have done:

See our Report to Shareholders Part 1, here.

Here’s what we haven’t done:

Start recording yet.
Yep. Not a typo.

Here’s why: Um…

Um…we’ll get to that in detail later in this shiny new year. But for now, suffice it to say that a big part of what’s taken so long has been undoing/redoing 20-year habits of how we um, do things, especially how we make records.

Vowed when we were done the Meadowlands that we’d never make another record that way or take that long to do it, again. Of course, the irony is that it took about 6 years to set everything up to ensure that it would never take 4 years to make another record. See the kind of Lewis Carroll world we inhabit?

A not-insignificant part of all that is the nuts & bolts of running any small business, the knowing (or learning / cramming last-minute) enough about a sultan’s variety of aspects of music business to keep your own small-business boat not only floating but solvent, handling the more mundane emails & calls and things faxed, not too mention gaining the experience to make the big plays, head things off at passes, negotiate forks in the road, generate business clichés, etc.

And doing that yourself around real life (i.e. jobs, children and their ceaseless petty demands) seems to mean that as a musician, you often find yourself taking conference calls but rarely setting up mic’s.
Let’s call it Death by D.I.Y.

talk to our people

So in an effort to reverse that ratio, and for a thousand other reasons that are proved almost daily lately, it gives me nearly immeasurable happiness to announce that….we’ve signed on with official management – Ben Dickey, and his wonderful team of do-greaters at Constant Artists.
They technically start on the job the first week in January (hey, that’s this week) so be sure to drop them a line and present them with your “actionable” business model for bringing us acclaim and riches.

And they’ll quash it so we don’t have to.

With Ben riding at our side, the last piece of the apocalyptic puzzle is now in place and so begins the End of Days. Only regret we didn’t do this sooner.

Still to come: What’s to come?

Timeline 2010, wrens-style, in Part 3.