WONDERLICK to Release Seventh Studio Album This Fall
The band's latest project comes by way of an announcement from Howlin' Wuelf Media.
WONDERLICK is preparing to release its seventh studio album this fall, according to an announcement from Howlin' Wuelf Media.
Wonderlick Loves You is the seventh full length effort from Wonderlick, the duo of Jay Blumenfield and Tim Quirk, both founding members of late 20th century alt-rock mischief makers Too Much Joy. The album was recorded in Virginia with local adepts in traditional Appalachian music. Wonderlick Loves You is being released October 9 on CD, digital download and streaming services by People Suck Music. The first single is 'Come Get On My Cloud' is released today. Have a look:
Jay Blumenfield's mother died two days before he got on a plane to Virginia to record this Wonderlick album.
He went anyway. He and Tim Quirk — the two halves of Wonderlick, a band that's been making records since 2001 — had spent months planning this trip. Inspired by two wildly successful (artistically AND economically) house show tours and binge-watching Les Blank documentaries, they wanted their next LP to capture the sense of immediacy and abandon those acoustic house shows had fostered.
So they hired a mobile recording engineer and fiddler named Mike Mitchell in Floyd, Virginia, a tiny Appalachian town where every other citizen just so happens to be a virtuoso player of old-time music. Their original plan had been to arrive on a Friday night, when the Floyd Country Store hosts weekly jamborees, and hire some of the musicians they heard to record Wonderlick's latest batch of songs in a cabin in the woods.
But Mike assembled a stellar crew of locals before they even arrived: banjo players, an upright bassist, a drummer, a clog dancer. He'd also secured a meditation center called the Shanti for the recording — a gorgeous open space with a wood-burning stove that, the band couldn't help noticing, felt a lot like the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. They'd spent a week Googling the Nashville numbering system, because that's what the Floyd musicians wanted instead of chord charts.
The idea was to find out what happens when you teach old-time musicians your punk-y songs. Best case: invent a new genre that somehow sounds like it's been around for centuries. Worst case: waste all the money you earned on your last tour on embarrassingly unreleasable tapes.
So Jay flew east with his grief, and Wonderlick got to work.
The result is Wonderlick Loves You, an album that has all the immediacy and abandon they'd been reaching for, as well as an undercurrent of woe they hadn't expected but probably should have been prepared for.
It's not a folk record so much as a Wonderlick record played with folk instruments. And it's not a collection of love songs so much as a set of songs about people who feel unloved — a boy who's jealous of all the attention a teenager with leukemia gets, a daughter who can't stop worrying, a daredevil who jumps over increasingly ludicrous things to command out attention — that try to correct the very problem they sing about by existing.
They cut five songs the first day. Eight more the next. As the sessions progressed, the local musicians stopped following the chord charts and started inventing. Mike heard string quartet parts, and plugged in his electric fiddle when a song demanded it. The bassist compared one tune to Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Fifteen-year-old Margo MacSweeney, a banjo player Tim and Jay saw perform at Friday's jamboree and insisted Mike hire for the sessions ended up singing on most of the album. Jay describes her voice as sounding 'like a vinyl record from the 1920s; she's only 15, but she sounds 2,000.' When Tim asked her if she'd ever heard of Evel Knievel — the subject of one of the songs she was keening on — she replied, 'I don't really know modern musicians.'
After hearing the playback of everything Margo had sung, Jay and Tim compared their goose bumps, and Jay told Tim he'd always wanted to make their Astral Weeks.
There's a song called 'Eric,' which shares its title with a book Tim read when he was ten, about a teenager who dies too young. The chorus mentions how much Eric's mom loved him, and how the person singing it wonders what that kind of love might feel like. Tim insisted on singing that part, because he couldn't bear anyone thinking a child of Susan Blumenfield's felt unloved — since Tim had loved her almost as much as Jay did.
They finished vocals at Landslide Studios in Asheville, outrunning an ice storm, eating at Waffle House on gift cards from a fan who'd once hosted them for a house concert. When the engineer whispered 'That's a good song' after a playback of Tim's vocal on 'Eric,' it sounded like he meant it.
Wonderlick started in 2001 as a side project for Quirk and Blumenfield, who'd spent the previous two decades in Too Much Joy — a band that got arrested in Miami for playing 2 Live Crew songs, charted on Modern Rock, earned an A− from Christgau, and never recouped a dime from Warner Bros. Their self-titled debut pioneered pay-what-you-want pricing years before Radiohead's In Rainbows; fans paid an average of $32. Six albums followed, including last year's Wonderlick Goes to War, produced by Dave Trumfio (Wilco, Built to Spill), and a 29-day, 27-state acoustic house show tour that included a performance in a Portland sex dungeon.
.jpg?format=auto&width=300)
