The Wrens

Ah that's so great!

I’m curious, are they self-releasing?

Bissell said about a year ago (?) that they had signed to a label, even showed him signing paperwork, but he declined to say what label. Who knows what the deal is now though

When I was at his place he told us the label... I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be a secret though?

I think it is? Maybe you could tell us what it rhymes with.

I have an urge to tell you, but I'm starting to second guess my memory? My wife is also fuzzy on it but she agrees it's probably the one I think...

I sorta reckoned as much anyway

Again, for the record we're both not 100% sure we remember correctly, but pretty sure.

iirc he's said they're intending for the label announcement to be part of the proper album announcement and everything

ah nice! had no idea they had a new album in the works of

I gues this puts them on track to release their 5th record some time around 2045 :D

works of

it's been in the works since 2010 and has been 'almost done' for like two years now, does seem like there's a chance of it finally coming out next year but i'm not getting my hopes up until there's a release date

He gave us some very specific timing estimations based on the promotional/manufacturing process... so it should definitely be for real this time. We'll see!

every time I hear the jeff rosenstock lyric "perfect always takes so long because it don't exist" I think of this goddamn album lol

Probably my most-anticipated release of '18. We'll see.

I've been anticipating this thing for so many years that the idea of it ever coming out sounds like something that's just forever off in the future. If it comes out in 2018 i'll be downright ecstatic.

my lord is there a more self-deprecating songwriter alive than Charles Bissell? today's update:

Super-short super-unimportant...I’d said I was gonna post an update at the end of Aug., and because these things often end up being sprawling multi-page affairs, I put it off. The new work-fast me is going bullet-point:

* Mastered finished songs last summer, i.e. Aug. 2017
* Mastering really just revealed that about half-doz. of them were either not so good or if on the right track, just not quite done, musically speaking.
* I worked on those all fall & winter
* Finished everything by the end of the school year, which was the goal ‘cause I knew summer was gonna be bonkers (family-wise, at-home-parent-of-three-grade-schoolers-wise), and it was. In a nice way. And one of the only stretches, health stuff aside, of really not working on the record at all. It was heavenly.
* With youngsters now back in school (this is the first full week), pulling up the now-finished songs & final-mixing them.
* Honestly, first time I”m happy. I mean I hate them, and myself now, but the record’s good. Not great, overworked maybe, but good (at least as much due Kevin’s anchoring anthems, which have largely been done for at least a year or two)
* Will mix the next little bit (I won’t dare give a specific time-frame but, I don’t know, into Oct..?), hand it in and let you know. Ta-da.
* Thanks, as always.

going back not to the recorded songs but to the songs themselves because mastering "revealed them as not so good" is a pretty intense stance. never heard of it really. like, when a track's mixed, ok. but mastering exposed something missing in the actual song? wild

overworked maybe

I had a sad chuckle at that

lol this album is never going to be finished

ffs even D’Angelo, dr dre and MBV have released their albums by now

I would be more annoyed about it but Charles seems a bit fragile and tbh it's probably for the best that he take his time! (and it's not like he/they have D'Angelo or MBV-level fanbases or resources to help them out...)

i can only imagine how much has been spent during this process. i mean they went to abbey road nine years ago

they didn't start working on it properly until 2010 or 2011 iirc

i don't blame charles for taking his time, especially with the health issues he's had and not having the resources to work on it full-time, but it's a bit sad that he doesn't seem to have the confidence to just let it be done, like deciding to re-write half the tracks after they've been mastered just seems bizarre

congratulations to the Wrens for cutting out a section of one of their still-unreleased songs and releasing it on its own, resulting in the best guided by voices song ever

I've lost myself to work
and lost Betsys to heaven
hard drives damn(ed) Kevin's house
putting demos of this down
please let these forfeit years put up profit and then some
fear far more handsome men come
able, funded, crowned

https://soundcloud.com/thewrens/and-its-all-guns-arrows-cut-bridge-as-of-122317

i rolled my eyes at this stalling tactic and then listened to it about 30 times -- it's so good!

this is like the fourth time they've done it, too

when charles is finally done with the album, he clearly should spend another decade stitching all the parts of songs he cut out into a new album

he says it's going to be done "next week" there so maybe we'll actually get it next year... lol

yeah sure

This boggles the mind - 240 gigobytes for one song! Content warning - the actual song isn't included here.

http://www.wrens.com/news-etc/2019/8/1/too-big-to-fail

"180-some tracks" on one song feels about right tbh

I hope Merge or whoever understands that idiots like me would pay good money for a release format that somehow contained this entire dumb archive

just stumbled across charles' latest update - as of a week ago the recording & mixing is done after being 'almost done' for the past 5 years or so

looking forward to 5+ years of updates on how the mastering is going

lol the meadowlands was #1 on my 2000s albums poll and even i've long given up on this album

if anyone in NYC wants to hear new Wrens material this week

Howdy,

If you wanna hear some of this now-done 10-year Odyssey of a recording (a not-pun that’ll be more clear when the record comes out), I’m gonna be doing a solo set of some of the songs (accompanied by my usual hide-me veil of loop pedal shenanigans), this Wed., January 8th around 6:30pm.

What makes this esp. nifty is that it’s for the closing party for the artist Beth Campbell’s (an actual genius and just my favorite) own solo show, How Do You Know I Am Not A Liar, at the Kate Werble Gallery (83 Vandam St., NYC (Beth’s show runs through this Friday, 1/10/20).

That’s the short of it: Album 4.5 songs, this Wed., 1/8/20, 6:30 at the Kate Werble Gallery.

Swing on by after work, Manhattan professionals.

The longer of it, where I first saw Beth’s work, and later how I got to know her and our still coming-together plan to collaborate re: this next record, is one of those fireside chats I roll out at these ‘come hear the record in our house’ things and even ties into to why I do them to begin with (which speaking of, one last round of those too starting Sunday, 3/1/20. But more on that later)….

Lol this new album is never coming out

idk i think it's actually vaguely possible it finally comes out this year considering all the "it's done for real this time it's finally mixed and i've stopped doing new overdubs at last" posts from around a month ago

this new post (http://www.wrens.com/news-etc/2020/1/29/welcome-back-mr-whelan-birthday-love-letter-to-the-one-at-stage-center) initially reads like kevin has only just started writing & recording new stuff for the record but if you read closely charles mentions he wrote most of the post back in 2013 and kevin has been working on the record with him for years so i don't actually think they've suddenly decided it's not actually done

I used to read all those posts with excitement, then I saw how long this one was and I just tuned out lol

idk i think it's actually vaguely possible it finally comes out this year

hahahahhAHAHAHAHHhahahahahzhahahahahhaa

good thing they can't go back in time and unrelease the meadowlands

don't get me wrong, they'll have written the most gut-wrenchingly self-aware song about "how they're aware they'd said the album was coming out at a timeframe but now that's not the case and you'll find out a teensy weensy bit more after i've fed my chickens update in 2021."

Very proud of and happy for anyone who doesn’t need to finish what they’re working on and therefore doesn’t finish it. True achievement.

OK now that I've read a fuller depiction of Charles' struggles via this long interview I am determined to no longer snark on the long recording time of this album

Exactly how grim it would become, however, was not yet clear. While visiting his in-laws that Thanksgiving, Bissell began feeling severely ill. He and his wife went first to a walk-in clinic and finding that closed, went to a hospital emergency room where Bissell collapsed in the waiting room. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, which led to sepsis. He wound up being placed on a breathing tube and kept in the hospital’s intensive care unit for a week.

“I didn’t know until weeks afterwards, until after I got home, how bad it actually was. My first clue was that on my last night in the hospital they put me in a regular room and the nurse said, ‘I was here the night you were brought in. I didn’t think you were going to make it.’ I was like, ‘Wait…what are you talking about?’” His recovery ended up taking months. “It took me a month or two to be able to walk up the steps without stopping. It was a weird preview of what it’s like to be ninety.”

In 2015, he was hospitalized with pneumonia again, again while visiting his in-laws. He wound up back at the same hospital. This time, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that can cause damage to the kidneys and bones. In the spring of 2016, he began chemotherapy back home in New York. He describes one of the side effects of the therapy as being, “like the most tired you’ve ever been in your life.”

https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2020/03/12/the-comeback-kids-the-wrens-and-their-long-awaited-new-album/

longish new interview

https://uproxx.com/indie/the-wrens-interview-long-wait-meadowlands-followup/

also I did not know that a genuine full new Wrens song was floating around out there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrMOgcvOoyE

make that two and they're both long and great? wtf?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuoTSoKb44

"crescent" and "as i've known" are two songs actually, but one segues into the other. "crescent" is from 2010 and "as i've known" is from 2011, but i think they're still planned for the album. "three types of reading ambiguity" is from 2015 but i think charles has indicated in the past that he's significantly reworked it since that release (of course)

as usual with album 'news' from them, i'll believe it's done when i have a copy of it

You’ve announced a few times since we last talked that the album is finished and then it never actually came out.

Charles: It was really just to make me finish and hand it in. Somehow if I went ahead and said it out loud, then I’d be forced to be done. But it didn’t really change anything, because I couldn’t solve the songs, I couldn’t figure out how to make them work. So you can want to be done, but that doesn’t mean you will be.

of course lol

"It was really just to make me finish and hand it in." <---me in college