THE WALLACE BROS. SPREAD THE LOVE
For Immediate Release—On St. Valentine’s Day 2009, the Wallace Bros. released a free download of their 2008/2009 Valentine’s EP, featuring three tracks which cover five songs by a diverse cross-cut of the best music of the last five decades, including Michigan’s best-kept secret, Delta 88; Canadian alt-folk phenoms Royal City; creepy 1950’s sisters Prudence and Patience; the Magnetic Fields, and The Beatles.
Fans can download the tracks at the band’s myspace page
www.myspace.com/wallacebros
or directly from the band’s website
http://www.wallacebros.org/freelove/loveforfree.html
The band is also offering physical copies of the record for free to fans at their request. Fans ordering physical copies of the record on Valentine’s Day itself will also be eligible to receive the special bonus of a kiss* from either band member (please specify Mark or Carey).
This release signals the resurrection of a strong tradition of Valentine’s Day Fan Club releases dating from 2004 to 2006. After a brief break in 2007, the band returned to “I Know”, a Delta 88 cover originally recorded in 2005, pairing it with Prudence and Patience’s “You Belong To Me” with the hope of a 2008 release date. Reports surrounding the record’s perpetual delays mentioned Mark’s failed love affair with Kirsten Dunst, Carey’s retreat to the mountains of Mississippi, and arson at Mark’s Detroit residence as factors, but the band insists it was simple perfectionism. “He’s like a dog,” Carey says of her brother, the band’s recording impresario. “He can hear all these sounds that other people can’t. There’s a whole bell line that’s out of the range of normal human hearing. And then we had to get those suckers in tune.”
Her brother agrees, denying the reports of arson with special vehemence. “That guy under my house with the blowtorch, that was me,” he insists. “I was unfreezing my pipes. They just couldn’t tell who it was in the glare from the searchlight."
In the waning days of 2008, the band went into the studio again, this time with Delta 88’s songwriter and front man Danny Kline sharing vocal duties with them on a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love”, which had been the wedding song that year of a close family friend. Axl Rose, who happened to be in Ann Arbor for the holidays, made a special guest appearance on drums. The resulting track is a pop concoction which Mark says, “sounds just the way our music has always sounded in our own heads.”
*kisses only available by mail.
The Wallace Bros.:
The Catholic Worker Interview
TCW: So I notice you’ve been quoted as saying that these songs sound the way the music ‘has always sounded in your own heads’. That’s quite an accomplishment.
MW: Well, it’s always sounded that way to us. I mean, it’s our heads.
TCW: But bridging that distance, between the mind and the paper or the mind and the tape—that’s one of art’s biggest challenges.
MW: You know what worries me? There are a lot of people who think they’re great at something in their own heads. But it’s only in their own heads.
TCW: A kind of overconfidence.
MW: You hear them singing in hotels. In the showers. I mean, Carey thinks she sounds like Liz Phair if you turn the reverb all the way up.
CW: I totally do. You just never let them leave enough on.
MW: Okay, see? Your head plays all kinds of tricks on you. In my head sometimes I think I can totally use a mitre saw. I mean, how hard can it be? But then you get the damn thing out, and suddenly your kitchen table only has three legs. So how do you know what’s good or not? It’s scary.
TCW: Well, you know the other thing I thought was interesting about that statement, that for the first time you feel like you’ve really captured your own sound, is that these aren’t actually your own songs.
CW: What do you mean by that?
TCW: It’s just interesting, that you feel the most like yourself as a band when you’re singing songs other people have written. Especially since your work has been so—how can I put it? Maybe I can say your influences have always been very apparent.
MW: One article said ‘derivative’. I never got what that meant.
CW: Just to be clear, we never listened to the Magnetic Fields until after we started the band. Then people kept on mentioning them to us, and we picked up an album and realized this guy had been ripping us off for years.
TCW: But it’s also interesting because these aren’t exactly straight covers. And in two cases, you’re actually blending songs from relatively disparate acts.
MW: Well, that’s how we write. You just take two songs you like, put them in a bag, and shake them up.
CW: Only this time we just didn’t shake them up.
MW: Sometimes we don’t even have two songs. Sometimes Carey just writes new lyrics.
CW: Like “Stacy, Stacy.” That’s just Polar Opposites by Modest Mouse with meaner words. And the changes to “Dirty Secrets” are totally by this Australian band that no one listens to.
MW: What was their name?
CW: I can’t remember.
TCW: Well, a Valentine’s Day release certainly seems fitting, since the Wallace Bros. are known for their love songs. Your originals are some of the happiest love songs out there. People are even quoting them on Facebook to describe what they want in a date.
CW: Yeah, we’ve always thought that there weren’t enough happy love songs in the world. They’re actually really hard to find. There are a lot of ‘falling in love’ songs, and a lot of heartbreak songs, but almost none from the inside of just being in love and happy.
MW: That’s because when you’re in love and happy you’ve got better things to do than write a song.
TCW: So how do you guys do it? Write from the heart of that happiness?
CW: Oh, we don’t.
TCW: No?
CW: Our love songs are all hypothetical.
TCW: Hypothetical love songs? Wait, but would you say that either of you has ever been in love?
MW: What did you say?
TCW: I said, have you ever been in love?
MW: What kind of question is that, man? That’s like asking, “Have you ever smoked crack?” Have you ever smoked crack, man? For God’s sake! This isn’t a joke! That s*** is dangerous! It ruins lives.
TCW: Well, people fall in love all the time..
MW: They smoke crack all the time, too! That doesn’t make it right! I thought this was going to be a serious interview.
TCW: I’m sorry, I..
MW: Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve got friends who have tried that stuff, and it’s ugly. I’ve seen what it can do to people. They’re never the same. They’ve always got this.. hollow look in their eyes.
TCW: Well, gee, I guess I just thought.. I mean, the songs tell such a beautiful story. You’d like to believe they’re true.
MW: There are a lot of things that’d be nice to believe. Did you know Valentine isn’t even the saint of love? We don’t actually know anything about him except for when he died. He’s just a saint whose “acts are known only to God.” And then a bunch of writers made up all this stuff about him, based on nothing.
TCW: That actually sounds kind of like falling in love.
MW: Right?
CW: Or like the power of a love story to change the world.