Per Second Second: Getting Older Alongside The Wrens’ Meadowlands
On hearing new things in old records
When I first started listening to punk, the easiest education came in the form of the compilation CD. At around $5 a pop, they offered the opportunity to hear twenty or so bands from specific labels and sub-genres. For an insecure 12-year old trying desperately to establish himself as an authority on anything remotely “cool,” a few bucks was a small price to pay for sudden access to the conversations taking place among bands at my local VFW halls.
One of the first compilations I bought was Drive Thru Records’ You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again. I recognized some of the names on the track list from eavesdropping on some of the older kids at the shows, like Midtown and New Found Glory, but didn’t have enough money to buy either of their actual records. Most of the songs were what you’d expect from a label that launched the careers of those bands —a lot of nasally singing, more than a few melodramatic songs about heartbreak, a few confused horns left over from third wave ska. It instantly became my favorite CD.
But there was one band on You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again buried towards the end of the 22 tracks who stood out. The Wrens’ two tracks, “This Boy is Exhausted” and “Miss Me” (which was later renamed “Boys, You Won’t”), were outliers amidst the endless parade of junior high heartbreak and sophomoric jokes.
This contrast only became more evident when I studied the liner notes, where almost all of the band photos featured peroxide-blonde brats whose thrift store shirts exposed their fragile rib cages. The Wrens, meanwhile, sat calmly and stared at the camera, grinning slightly, as if during the shoot they had anticipated just how out of place they’d eventually look.
Every song before and after the Wrens’ on that comp valued directness above everything else — this girl dumped me and it hurts, my parents don’t understand me and it’s not fair — but I couldn’t quite make out the heroes and villains in “This Boy is Exhausted” and “Miss Me.” At first I was confused, and then I was entranced. I pressed repeat on those two tracks countless times alone in my room, wondering who these people were and what, exactly, had happened to them. There was heartbreak, frustration, and disappointment, but it sounded different. It sounded like adulthood.
By the end of highschool, the record store where I had purchased You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again had closed. The new one that opened in its place didn’t stock cheapo punk compilations, but I had outgrown them and much of that scene by then anyway. The new store offered my friends and I an essential venue for teenagers: it was a physical space that was neither school or one of our parents’ houses. This was where we’d spend most of our downtime and the paychecks from our minimum wage jobs. Where we’d go to feel like grownups, although half of us still had strict curfews.
On one of those aimless afternoons, I noticed a new record from The Wrens called The Meadowlands. They had never released an album on Drive Thru, which led me to believe years earlier that they had called it quits and entered real life. I’d soon learn my assumption was only half-true.
If you’re not familiar with the well-documented history behind the album’s writing and production, it’s still likely a story you’ve heard before, even if it was about another band. The Wrens kept waiting for their moment and it never came. They bowed out of the industry, opting instead for families and more typical jobs. Meanwhile, they kept writing and recording, slowly piecing together what would become 2003’s The Meadowlands.
At the time, this was little more than an intriguing backstory for me. What I loved so much about The Meadowlands was that I wanted to believe that I had finally grown into a thoughtful, mature, literate person. I wanted to believe that if I had sat beside them in the press photo from You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again that I might have been mistaken for a member of the band, laughing along at our shared joke.
The Meadowlands was one of a handful of records that soundtracked all of the seminal moments of the end of my high school days. Like more than one self-absorbed teen before me, I was certain that these songs had been specifically written for me — or, at the least, someone like me.
But unlike a number of those other records, listening to The Meadowlands today isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. My relationship with it has continued to grow, expanding far beyond my initial impression from nearly fifteen years ago. I no longer see the characters I pictured hearing the early sketches of these songs on You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again. Maybe because I’ve met almost all of them in my adult life. Likewise, I no longer hear the songs of heartbreak that I had considered anthems when I was seventeen. In fact, at thirty, I’m not sure that there’s much about romance on the record at all — maybe everything just sounds like it’s about heartbreak when you’re seventeen.
When I listen to The Meadowlands now, what’s interesting to me are the people playing, the four guys tracking these songs on long nights after work and in-between the kinds of adult responsibilities that are important but not necessarily interesting. I hear the weekends spent in an old house in North Jersey, where a handful of longtime friends attempt to see if they’re still capable of making something worthy of other people’s time.
In a time when the larger industry seems to be growing increasingly image-obsessed, where social media presence and album rollouts are weighed in critical evaluations, it’s inspiring to listen to something that was created with absolutely no career ambitions. It’s a reminder about why we might continue to make things, long after the rest of life has caught up to us.
