As mentioned as part of our 20th at Maxwell’s, we've also made a 20th Anniversary shirt and it's now swap-able for fifteen of your dollars in our store.

With the design by Phillip Niemeyer of Double Triple in Brooklyn, the first batch was hand-silkscreened by Charles & Phillip at Charles’ house. You can see a photo of their Warhol Silver Factory-style production going down here, (charles is to the right of your screen).

The second larger batch was hand-screened by the band in the basement of Maxwell’s, mere hours before the 20th anniversary shows, (so definitely pop those under an iron or in the dryer before you wash ‘em). Pretty sure Radiohead have the same pre-show routine.

As proof that we’re as arguably/dumbly DIY (deep-six it yourself) as we claim, click on the shot below for a few more photos from the Ken Burns’ making-of-the-shirt documentary. They also serve to answer that other riddle of the Sphinx, what walks on eight legs at night in the basement? (A: the wrens in middle age making shirts before shows):

Unintentionally, we’re posed strangely similarly to the inner sleeve of the Tubes’ “Completion Backward Principle”. As we mentioned at the close of our last record… click here.

And while we’re merching our heads off, we’ve also added a black version of the ‘Keeping folks waiting. Since 1989’ shirt . Hard to tell since in the photos, the brown look black and vice versa, but trust me, they’re color-correct and stunning. While still being textually succinct.

You’ll find both of these for sale, along with the rest of this season’s line, in our corner store.

Thanks, as always,
the wrens

We played Abbey Road...so that you could shop there.

For the confident New Jersey man.

This shirt was a rip of the logo for the Garden State Parkway, the main north/south toll road that runs along the NJ coast, more or less.
The Parkway is 172.4 miles long, has 3000 acres of mowable land that runs alongside and is ranked as the busiest toll road in the world (surprising if you've even been on the NJ Highway Authority's other shining star, the New Jersey Turnpike). Exit 4 of the Parkway leads to Wildwood, NJ, home of the largest builder of miniature golf courses.

In brown:

And ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille:

And in b&w and its close-up:

This is a t-shirt orginally designed, made & sold by our friend Michael Wojtasiak, who ran NoKarma Records & store and started this very website in the mid-to-late '90s.

and the penguin at less of a remove:

Howdy,

Just a little drop-by to say that we’re nearing the end of our run with the Abbey Road t-shirts . The idea here being that, of course, in these iffy econo-times, we want your money.

Kidding (although we would consider a substantial discount for any purchases made with gold brick or antiquities). Really, it’s that rather than ending up with a merch store stacked rafters-high with a line of adult & children’s apparel that would dwarf the racks of your standard J. Crew store, we’re doing these different designs more or less one at a time, ltd. ed.-style. So as in comes this season’s latest Wrens look, fresh from the catwalks of Teaneck, out goes the old.

We do know that’s one of the ways one’s supposed to pull income as a band - by keeping the goods count high - but we’ve always kind of felt that having a merch store with too much stuff, I don’t know…just feels kinda cheap or greedy or something. Then again I've considered approaching advertisers with rates for product placement in future wrens songs (she sends kisses...from Hershey), so take all this with a few grains of salt. And speaking of salt, be sure to check out this week's specials on sea salt and our full line of imported gourmet herbs and spices, in the Wrens' Kitchen Notions department!

Sorry, where was I? Right, we make these

Sorry…where was I? Right, maybe we should also clarify, it’s one or two shirt options at a time because we make these things ourselves. This isn’t something one of our ‘people’ green-lighted in a closed-door meeting with staff. These are wrens shirts through and through (literally. Kevin wears them to work by the half-dozen to ‘set’ the ink). So with the Abbey Road-wear for ex., Charles designed them, Kev & Greg silkscreened them, and Jerry, to be blunt, sells the shit out of them at shows.
It’s all part of our continued dedication to the now seemingly old-fashioned D.I.Y. aesthetic.

We’ve begun collecting the previous designs in our newly-launched Gallery of Old Wrens Shirts Gone By , just so you can better see what you’ve missed by not being on top of our early-‘90s merch offerings, you poor bastards. Ok granted, there’ll be some gallingly bad shirts there but we make music, not textiles. And we barely do that.

This was our shirt for about 6 years - 2003 to 2009 - or about 5 years too long.