What happens to a dream deferred?
The poet Langston Hughes couldn’t definitively answer that question.
However, former Secaucus resident Charles Bissell of the rock band The Wrens can.
In between the last two Wrens’ albums with the locally tinged titles Secaucus and The Meadowlands, seven years of soul-searching and frustration put the dreams of Bissell and his band mates to the test. In the end, The Wrens’ dreams may have been deferred for a while, but as the four former Secaucus residents work on a follow-up album, they were not denied.
Inside the house on Luhmann Terrace
There was a time when most of the band members lived together in a house in Secaucus, a situation that influenced several of their songs.
Bissell, 42, who plays guitar and sings for The Wrens, first came to North Jersey for college. After growing up in South Jersey, he enrolled in William Paterson in the late 1980s. Shortly thereafter, he formed the band with brothers Greg and Kevin Whelan, who also contribute guitar and vocals. Drummer Jerry MacDonald rounds out the quartet.
“I was already up here for school,” Bissell remembered. “We all had a common bond from growing up together and playing together.”
The band lived together in the North End of Secaucus in a house on Luhmann Terrace. The landscape of Secaucus and the surrounding Meadowlands influenced The Wrens’ music in ways other than providing convenient titles for their albums.
“Our music is about a lot of different things, but where you live influences who you are,” Bissell said. “If you live and work in New Jersey, some things are fundamentally different than if you live and work in Brooklyn. The first song on Secaucus is called “Yellow Number Three” after our house on Luhmann Terrace. On The Meadowlands album, the first song is called “The House That Guilt Built” because with all of us living together, if you weren’t home in the house making music, you felt guilty that you weren’t holding up your end. The whole way of life changes things about you.”
Bissell also admitted that the Garden State’s ongoing identity crisis also affected the band’s work.
“New Jersey is so dwarfed on both sides,” he said. “The New York skyline and the whole hub of the culture is right there, and you almost don’t count. It’s hilarious that the New York Times is calling Philadelphia the sixth borough, and somehow New Jersey is entirely skipped over.”
As the band members naturally changed, their music mutated as well.
“Over time, we started to write more and more about ourselves and make the songs more and more realistic,” Bissell said. “That was kind of the case with Secaucus, and it was definitely the case with The Meadowlands. That album is about us being in a band and not having money.”
Hard times in Hudson County
The strained state of affairs that led to the band being borderline broke occurred after the release of Secaucus in 1996. Grass Records, the Wrens’ label at the time, was bought by Alan Meltzer, who tried to steer the band towards hit songs and mass popularity. When the Wrens resisted, they were dropped from the label, and production of their previous records was halted. For a while, The Wrens were somewhat adrift.
“The very fact that you’re 35 to 40 and still living together with two other guys and you’re not even gay isn’t so funny,” he said. “It’s like gambling. The longer you sit at the table, you say I’ve bet all of these years, now I’ve really got to win to justify what I’ve been doing for so long.”
The Meadowlands breakthrough
The band struggled to stay together and make music for the next seven years. The follow-up record to Secaucus, entitled The Meadowlands, was released by the record label Absolutely Kosher in the fall of 2003. In line with their new label name, the opening verse of “The House That Guilt Built” reflects a pure truth about what seven years of self-doubt can do to one’s psyche:
It’s been so long
since you heard from me
got a wife and kid
that I never see
and I’m nowhere near
what I dreamed I’d be
I can’t believe
what life has done to me
What was almost unbelievable was the critical acclaim that The Wrens received for The Meadowlands after such a long wait. The esteemed rock critic Robert Christgau gave the record an A rating, while the well-regarded and highly picky independent rock internet publication Pitchfork gave the record a rare 9.5 out of 10 rating.
Even the conflict with Meltzer was resolved, and The Wrens’ old albums were re-released. Bissell remembers his conversation with Meltzer well.
“Meltzer said ‘Life is too short, and I don’t give a crap about some issue from 10 years ago.'” he remembered.
Bissell looked at the band’s seven-year overnight success with a grateful but cautious eye.
“One lesson could be stick to your guns, and if you’re willing to put in the time and do the work, things could possibly pay off,” he said. “The critical success has been very liberating. It even created the option of walking away. It has taken the pressure off.”
Going forward
With considerably lighter hearts, The Wrens are now working on a new record and playing live often, including at places like the influential Hoboken music venue Maxwell’s. With their success, Bissell noted that The Wrens’ approach to making records has and hasn’t changed.
“When we were making The Meadowlands, we felt that this was it, or we’re done,” he said. “We came out of that process very sure of ourselves. Now more than ever it’s about making really good albums, which are more like movies or books to me. That may be a weird thing to do now, with all of the file-sharing going on, but that’s how I feel. In a lot of ways, the band and I are homebodies who stay home and watch cable and make our records. We just want to make the best records we can. For me, this seems to be the thing that I’m supposed to do.”
Now certain of what they are supposed to do, Bissell and The Wrens have a clearer vision about what they want to convey to people through their work.
“I’ve given a lot of thought about what I have to say,” he said. “While we were making The Meadowlands, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to write about. I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem or anything else that is usually glamorized in the arts. What’s my insurmountable thing? And then over time I realized that I’m not using any of my advantages because I threw my whole hat into the ring with this band thing. I set up my own stumbling blocks by choosing to be in a band, for better or worse. It took us time to figure out that maybe that’s our story.”