A conversation with Greg Whelan of The Wrens from 2004

The bassist for the long-dormant, long-suffering New Jersey indie underdogs talks about making The Meadowlands, living in the same house as his bandmates, and accidentally spawning Creed

Sep 12, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!

THE OPENERS

This week on Commotion, I produced this discussion about the new Joni Mitchell box set, Joni’s Jazz, wherein Slate crritic Carl Wilson and CBC’s Saturday Night Jazz host Laila Biali explain why the leap from “Marcie” to Mingus wasn’t nearly as unexpected as the history books make it out to be.
I also produced today’s week-in-review episode, which includes hot takes on the new Spinal Tap movie, the Ed Sheeran record, Swag II, and Lizzo’s war on the algorithm, courtesy of Maura Johnston, Richie Assaly, and Leila Latif.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Click here for the Apple Music version
- Suede, “Antidepressants”: In a year where Pulp released an excellent comeback album and Oasis has dominated the social-media feeds of anyone over the age of 35, don’t overlook the undiminished vitality of Suede, who are now 12 years and five albums into a second act that shows no signs of letting up. And the punky title track from their new record ranks among the most exquisite pieces of trash in their collection.
- JayWood, “Pistachios”: If you’re jonesing for another dollop of Dijon but don’t want to commit to another 23 tracks of Swag, then the new album from this Montreal-via-Winnipeg maverick, Leo Negro, will satisfy your appetite for soupy, psychedelic rap-soul.
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Murder of Crows”: The first single from the multidisciplinary Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist’s upcoming album, Live Like the Sky (out Oct. 24), hops aboard Kurt Vile’s freak train for a dream-pop journey through the heartland.
- Boy Commandos, “Tara”: The debut solo release from Fucked Up’s Mike Haliechuk, “Comet”, delivers the expected Sugar rush, but the record’s true highlight is this mid-album/mid-tempo blast of bliss, which executes the same shoegaze/jangle-pop balancing act that Hotline TNT mastered earlier this year on Raspberry Moon. (Note: this song is isn’t available on Spotify, so either check it out via the Apple Music link above, or, better yet, buy the record on Bandcamp.)
- Alex Lukashevsky, “OOOOH!”: Alex has been a “your favourite musician’s favourite musician” figurehead in the Toronto underground for a quarter century now—just ask Kevin Drew (who’s produced him) or Meg Remy (who covered him on the recent U.S. Girls album) or Owen Pallett (who once devoted an entire EP to his songs). Alex tends to disappear for long stretches only to resurface out of the blue to rearrange our innards anew: OOOOH! (out Oct. 24) is his first release after a 13-year absence—long enough that his son is now old enough to play in his band—and this preview track shows him delivering with his Dylan-via-Beefheart skronk-rock contortions with heretofore unflexed muscle.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Greg Whelan of The Wrens

The date: January 28, 2004

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto; Greg was calling in from his home in Secaucus, New Jersey

Album being promoted: The Meadowlands

The context: For a group that hasn’t put out a new record in 21 years, The Wrens can be a tough band to keep up with. Since releasing their critically adored third album, The Meadowlands, back in 2003, there have been reports of an imminent follow-up and reports that no album is actually forthcoming; acrimonious exchanges in the press between chief songwriters Charles Bissell and Kevin Whelan; break-up announcements followed by denials of the break-up announcements; a cancer scare; side-project spin-offs that have yielded songs that were supposed to be Wrens songs; and—just this week—side-project break-up announcements followed by denials of side-project break-up announcements. These boys are exhausted, indeed.

Then again, nothing has ever come easy for this band. Even the triumph of The Meadowlands was preceded by a seven-year struggle to get it over the finish line. I’ll let the intro from my original 2004 Eye Weekly article set the scene for my Q&A with guitarist Greg Whelan. (Note: I wrote the words below shortly after turning 29.)

They say that life begins at 30, but let’s face it, that’s really just a nice way of saying you’re already dead. Two glasses of wine is all it takes to get you drunk, staying in becomes the new going out, and all your hopes and dreams get lost in a pile of dry-cleaning tags, supermarket coupons, and mortgage statements.

By all empirical rock ‘n’ roll measures, The Wrens should be very, very dead. The boys in the band are a whole lot closer to 40 than 20. While other groups from New Jersey would logically flock to New York City to make a go of it, The Wrens limit their stays in Manhattan to between the hours of 9 and 5; then it’s back across the Hudson to Secaucus, where three of The Wrens—guitarist Greg Whelan, his bassist brother Kevin, and guitarist Charles Bissell—have shared the same house for over a decade. (Drummer Jerry MacDonald was also once a resident, but opted to raise his three kids in an environment where they wouldn’t be coerced into supplying back-up harmonies.)

In 11 years, The Wrens have managed to record a grand total of three albums, though that’s not entirely their fault—they’ve been fucked around by record companies so many times, Webster’s should introduce the term “getting Wrenned” to describe the state of being fucked around by record companies. Last fall, The Wrens put out their third album, The Meadowlands—a good four years after they first began recording it in their studio (i.e., their dining room), and seven years after releasing their previous, 1996's Secaucus. To say it was a dark, drawn-out period “would be a gross understatement,” Greg quips.

The intervening years were marked by broken record-label promises, broken relationships and broken hopes, not to mention the guilt of having inadvertently altered the course of American rock music for the worse: After their former label boss, Alan Meltzer, cut the band from his Grass Records roster in 1997 (because The Wrens refused to sign on some dubious dotted lines), he decided to focus his grunge gold-mining efforts on some Christian rockers from Florida. That’s right: If The Wrens had been a little more willing to play ball with Grass Records, we might’ve been spared Creed.

But from the emotional wreckage, The Wrens built indie-rock’s first great mid-life crisis record. The Meadowlands rekindles those distant, euphoric memories of hearing a Pavement or Guided by Voices record for the first time in 1993, but delivers them with crushing reminders that those carefree college years are long gone. In short, it’s a record that forges its own new genre: emo for adults.

The Meadowlands is a very emotional album with a long, fraught backstory. Is it possible for you to play these songs without being thrust right back into those heavy moments?

It really was what we were all going through at the time, and it sums up where we were for all those years and everything we went through to get where we’re at now. It’s not all doom and gloom, even though it may sound like that. It’s just real life. And when we were actually doing it… I don’t want to get all corny, but it was real, it was legit, it wasn’t a staged emotional kind of thing. And those songs were reworked and redone like 8,000 times. “Happy” was a completely different tune for a long, long time that we actually played for one of the A&R guys that we were dealing with at the time. And finally we were like, “This song blows,” but then we just went into the basement and—this is something we never do—it became probably the only real “jam” kind of song that we’ve ever written, where all four of us were actually down there. It’s a true jam. Whatever feels good and works, that’s what we kept. It’s really weird—by the time we were finished, we thought we had made a half-decent record, but we were just glad to get it done with. And, after all these years, is anyone really going to even give a shit? A couple of our friends who have been die-hards, they’ll listen to it, so they’ll go to the show and if we’re lucky, we’ll play to 50 people. But it’s just turned out awesome—not just the record necessarily, but the people are coming out, and the response has been overwhelming, really. It’s very surreal—we appreciate it, but it’s hard for us to even grasp it.

So with all the success you’re enjoying now, have you guys quit your day jobs?

Unfortunately no. We did it once before, and it would be cool to do it again, but now that we all have mortgages and stuff to pay, and our drummer has kids, it’s a little different. It’s all working out now. We’re really busy right now, but it’s cool—we’re handling it on a daily basis. Now that we don’t have all our eggs in one basket, things have worked out better anyways. Like, those childhood dreams of becoming rock stars—that’s gone out the window. And now that we don’t care anymore, things have really started to happen, so it’s very ironic how it all works out.

Is your employer at least sympathetic to your touring needs?

Well, we all try to save up vacation and that kind of stuff so we’ll be burning all that. That’s the cool thing about the press—we all work in Manhattan, and then a New York Times article on us comes out, so finally we’re validated. It’s not like, “Oh, you’re in some little band that does its little band kinda thing.” It’s like, “Hey, we’re kinda real!”

Three quarters of your band lives together in the same house, Monkees-style. So which Monkee are you?

I guess I’m probably Mike—more quiet, more mellow. My brother’s more Peter Tork—kinda goofy like that. But if there was any band I could be in—besides, of course, The Beatles—it would be The Clash. We are really four personalities, but when you throw them all in the big pot, we do have a very collective attitude. We’re very individualistic about certain things, but when it comes to the band and the music and the direction we want to take, we’re all pretty much a collective gang from Jersey.

And you also do your recording at home, which doesn’t exactly encourage a healthy work/life balance….

At one point when we were making the record, I was like, “This is completely miserable. This is like being in a concentration camp somewhere.” Now we always joke, “the next record is not going to be recorded that way—we’re not going to put ourselves through that.” We’re getting too old to do that. When we put the next record out, we’ll be collecting social security.

How important is living in New Jersey to the band’s identity?

There’s definitely something about living in Jersey. There’s not too many Jersey bands who really keep it here. Most of them who started off here do wind up in New York. Or right now, Brooklyn is the cool place to be—they all flock there. But for us—again, not to be corny—it’s kinda that Springsteen mentality. Although we’re educated and we all have white-collar jobs, Secaucus is—especially where we live and have lived for many, many years—very blue collar, very “go down to the local bar and kick it out with the boys.” It’s just got that industrial… not industrial in a techno kind of feel, but just that blue-collar mentality, where the people here are really, really cool and very nice and very supportive and they work their hard lives to feed their families and have that two-week vacation every year. So yeah, it definitely comes out in the music.

When you perform now, do you find you’re the oldest ones in the club?

A lot of bands we started out with, they’re long gone, but those guys still come to the show. It’s pretty cool. We’ve shown that you don’t have to be Justin Timberlake, although that wouldn’t be bad. I saw this show on him last night at the gym—he’s got all this money and he’s, like, 22 years old! It’s, like, holy shit. And he’s been around forever, so he started when he was four. But it’s all cool. Age doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re having fun, putting out good stuff.

Were Guided by Voices an inspiration in that regard?

Yeah, pretty much, because we look at them and it’s like, “They did it—We can do it.” It means a lot to us that anyone would even go out and buy the record or even come to the show. At this point, you think most people would be like, “Who gives a shit?” But it’s been really, really cool. Someone told us, “For the month of October, you Soundscanned 10,000.” And we were like, “10,000!?! What are you smoking!” But it’s really funny: The record’s selling really well and all the shows we play are sold out. The last time around, we’d be like, “Sold out? What—are you crazy? It’s sold out because of the other bands we’re playing with.” But now it’s like, “No, man, people are here to see you!”

Before I let you go—I wanted to ask about your relationship with your former [Grass Records] labelmates, Brainiac, who were such an amazing, overlooked band. And even [singer] Tim [Taylor]’s death was overshadowed by Jeff Buckley’s death a few days later…

That was a very bad week because we were really good friends with Brainiac but also Jeff Buckley, because our drummer worked for a touring company that did a lot of stuff with Jeff Buckley. It was freaky, because he was supposed to come to our house one week and record vocals, and then all this shit happened. It was just gruesome. He was a very, very nice guy and such a talented dude. And, of course, Tim from Brainiac—he was the ultimate. That shit you saw, that was all him—no faking, no posing.

I wasn’t aware of your Buckley connection. You’re like the missing link between him and Creed.

I guess you can do the Kevin Bacon thing with us. Yeah, Creed—those fuckers should be thanking us, because if it wasn’t for us, they wouldn’t even be there. But whatever. We wouldn’t have been able to do what they did.

So Creed is all your fault.

We take the blame for Creed. They should be thanking us, and everyone else should be coming down and burning down our doors—”Hey, it’s your fault, you created that Frankenstein monster!” But save that for our next record: “It was all hype, those guys suck, they should’ve ended it after the last record—and by the way, they’re the reason Creed got signed. Kill them!’

ENCORES

Of all the archival interviews I’ve published in this newsletter over the past year, no quote has aged better than Greg’s prediction that “when we put the next record out, we’ll be collecting social security.” With Bissell now 61 and the other guys not too far behind, they just have to hold out a few more years to stay true to his word.
In a tribute to Tim Taylor and Brainiac that ran in Pitchfork in 2017, Charles Bissell claimed that “Tim is the focus of a lyric on the Wrens’ forthcoming album.” But while that album has still yet to materialize, the song in question, “And It’s All Guns and Arrows,” did come out in 2023 via Bissell’s Car Colors project:
While Bissell has only released one Car Colors single to date—and may or may not be done with the project—Kevin Whelan (with the help of his brother Greg and drummer Jerry MacDonald) gave us the closest thing we may ever get to a new Wrens album with the 2021 release of Observatory, the debut album from his current outfit, Aeon Station: