The saga continues: Charles Bissell of the Wrens says that Car Colors is, in fact, not done. The musician clarified this in the comments of our recent post about no more Car Colors music was coming, considering he'd told a fan, "I just no longer want to do this anymore.” But this is not the case.
Here's what he said in his first comment, explaining that his reply to the fan had not been completely serious and that there's actually been progress with the material:
Stereogum...!
While I do realize and appreciate how well-intentioned this is, and am just very flattered (if continually caught off-guard) that anyone is interested & writing anything 20+ years after a last album - truly - that isn't quiiiiiite what I said...!
Granted, I do still think of the internet/social media like the 61-year-old that i am, that my reply to someone online is, well, my rely to 'them', not the world at large necessarily. More like a conversation overheard on the street, I sorta picture no one else as listening in, even as I do know that they can hear me - and even as i know that online life doesn't work that way.
And yeah, I did say "I just no longer want to do this anymore" but this was just a comment/reply, not a mapped-out press release sorta thing. But I did also say that this was "the short answer". I guess another better shorter answer would've been "I haven't wanted to do this for a long time but now, after taking the last almost-two-years off, and for a bunch of reasons, I find myself more&more excited about music again"....or something akin.
Part of that's due to the break for sure, but part of that is also due to the bonkers political dungheap we've found ourselves in this past year. I've started to see music (and yeah, releasing music) as the one thing I could do to help out the most, beyond just donating or attending protests or writing congressional reps. So both in a practical sense (doing benefit shows/recordings, having more SM followers to share Gavin Newsom memes with) and just in personally sorta re-valuing the importance of art in general, to individual people, to me, in this climate/world."
To all that, coincidentally, Cory (Absolutely Kosher) & I just caught up a bit last week, after more than a year, and are hopping on a call week now that youngsters are back in school, to catch up and hopefully begin mapping out album release stuff if we're especially productive (ha). Paraphrasing, 'rumors of my (record's) demise are greatly exaggerated'.
As for the breakup of the Wrens, he explained that the members had been working on a record together without his knowledge, which he found out from a New York Times article. Here's what he said:
Shoooot, ok, so I went ahead and read most of the comments here annnnnd...again, I REALLY value, the "please… release the album, man." place where this all comes from. But I guess what's hard for me, and what I'm really conflicted about & is actually what I don't want to 'do' anymore, is talk about this stuff only in the terms in which they have put it. Or something...
When the other wrens left the band and put out their record, the framing & publicity campaign of which was anchored on a couple very deliberate...truth-light bio points...I made no official reply or rebuttal, which I should have, mistakenly thinking I could just take the high road or move on or that things would get better or whatever (although a few times when people would ask online, I did comment/reply with a couple-sentence summary of what actually happened and THOSE seeds didn't sprout 'Gum stories - ha). And time having passed and having moved on, even all that would be fine except that not having done that, it still frames how how all this is usually presented, incl. here.
Sooooo, admittedly years late but just to set even part of the record straight and setting aside a lot, in essence the band breakup is pretty simple:
The wrens album was finished in June of 2019 but before turning it in, I insisted that we finally talk about long-running, but I felt not-insurmountable, issues within the band (and to be clear&fair, some of which were certainly mine). Every band has its problems, and in some ways, ours was really only an exception in how long we stayed together in spite of those (luckily though, I feel that some good music came out of all that along the way). Those calls only really got underway in March of 2020, continuing off & on through June 2021.
But - and this is the crux of all of it - while those talks were ongoing, in that first summer of 2020, they began going into a friend's studio, in secret, to replace my parts in their songs (that I'd spent years on) and recording a few additional songs to extend those to a full album, which they arranged to release through Sub Pop (who we were signed with for that wrens album), all unbeknownst to me.
Then that September (2021) when the NY Times ran the piece that broke the news, I learned that they, w/ Sub Pop, were framing their entire album release/press on mainly two points, both false: first, that they were releasing their album because the wrens' album wasn't done (contradicted by the Times piece itself) and that I wasn't involved in any way with their songs.
And that's it really. Is it a major crime in the world, especially today's world? Of course not, I do know that. Was it at the same time, incredibly...difficult for me? Yes. And remains so when i still see the story presented through that lens, years later, knowing I could've headed at least some of that off if I'd spoken up then.
(an aside only 'cause it's mentioned above: there was no 'financial dispute'. While I won't go into the band issues themselves (it's all the typical ugly divorce-y stuff), the band had always split everything equally four ways, which through the '90s when the division of labor within the band was also pretty equally split, was perfect. As that work ratio changed in the years doing the meadowlands & then became more lopsided w/ this album, that became more&more of a problem. But again, I believed, a not-insurmountable one, as I said to them repeatedly during those calls).
So to wrap, they did not leave because they 'finally lost their patience with me'. They left because they did not want to address any of the issues within the band that had progressed to the point of real dysfunction, and did it in secret w/ Sub Pop's ok, and the horror of that divorce, and the wasted 30 years it represented, left me not wanting to do music again for years. But after this break, that feels like it's finally changing.
It feels both good and terrible to be typing this finally.
