THE WALLACE BROS. CELEBRATE TENTH ANNIVERSARY VALENTINE’S DAY SINGLE BY RELEASING SEVENTH ACTUAL VALENTINE’S DAY RECORD
For Immediate Release – The rumors were rampant, even transcendent, in the days leading up to the release of The Wallace Bros. Tenth Anniversary Valentine’s Day Single.
The Italian press hinted that the much-anticipated single would be dropped in a special St. Valentine’s Day audience with Pope Francis. TMZ reported that a spat between Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber was sparked when each thought the other had snatched up the rights to cover the song, which had actually been bought by Taylor Swift. Turkish journalists speculated that a sudden proliferation of dervishes in Istanbul was linked to the album, which would be celebrated by citywide display featuring ecstatic mystics spinning on every street. Midwestern farmers even reported bird migrations that they believed had been orchestrated by the band, including a flock of grackles that were alleged to sing 2012’s smash hit “You’re So Pretty (That I Don’t Know What To Do)” from an altitude of ten thousand feet.
But in the end, the band’s gesture was far more elemental: they simply released a record.
https://thewallacebros.bandcamp.com/album/valentines-day-single-2
“That’s actually kind of a big deal,” explains longtime fan Robert Pollard, reached for comment at his Indiana bunker. “Because they don’t always. I mean, last year they didn’t. I guess they did the year before that. And maybe the one before that. But you can’t ever tell.” A passionate glow, verging faintly on madness, lights in his eyes. “That’s what makes it so exciting.”
“Wallace Bros. fans are basically rats with buttons,” explains Rockefeller Fellow in Contemplative Neuroscience, Seymour Hairs. “If a rat gets a reward every time it pushes a button, he’ll give up almost immediately when that reward fails to appear. But if the rat gets intermittent reinforcement – sometimes the gouda’s there, sometimes it’s not – well, that little guy will keep pushing the button forever.
“It’s a powerful principle for a pop act to harness,” Hairs continues. “To me, it really speaks to The Wallace Bros.’ sophistication. And it’s actually a significant principle in romantic relationships. In fact, I’d say almost all of us have some personal experience with it. So it’s appropriate that they’ve employed it in particular as regards their series of Valentine’s Day releases.”
The single features three tracks. The A-side, “I’ve Seen It All Before (Tell Me Something I Don’t Know),” is an original by the band. But both the B-side, a medley of “Love Will Find You” and “The Sun Doesn’t Want to Shine” and the hidden track, “First Star”, were penned by Fred Thomas, the leader of Saturday Looks Good To Me, City Center, and flashpapr, along with his prolific career as a solo artist and producer of countless other acts.
“Fred does so much stuff, you never know how he does it all,” says Mark, the Wallace Bros. guitarist, bassist, and financier. “But then also, he does so much stuff that you can’t help wondering what he’s doing that absolutely nobody knows about. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if years from now, we find out that Miley Cyrus was actually a Fred Thomas side project. Not like, he recorded her. I mean like, he was her.”
Thomas not only penned three out of four of the tunes on the new release. He also joined the band as drummer during their recording session, the day after Christmas. “It was a risk,” says Carey, who shares songwriting credits with her brother. “Having the best songs on the album be the ones you didn’t write. And the best musician on the record be the only one who’s not actually in the band. I mean, for a minute there, we thought about only sending out the drum track, as the whole single. It would have been fierce. Like the White Stripes, if they’d had the balls to strip it down so far they even got rid of Jack.”
The Wallace Bros. tradition of Valentine’s Day releases dates back to 2004, when the band produced their first Valentine’s Day single as an edition of ten hand-made CDs with red and white doilies affixed to the cover by clear packing tape. Carey managed to place three of these in the local music section at Encore Records in Ann Arbor, and an international phenomenon was born.
Over the past decade, their February 14 releases have featured an eclectic mix of originals and covers by band influences like Bad English, Royal City, and The Magnetic Fields, as well as other special guests appearances by Danny Kline and Axl Rose.
“You know,” Mark reflects, “I hear people say, seven records in ten years, what is that, seventy percent? But there’s more than one way to look at it. I mean, you could say, seventy percent, that’s about a C minus, D plus.
“But the way I see it, it’s one hell of a batting average.
The Wallace Bros.:
The Platonic Dialogue
Socrates: So tell me a bit about the process of recording this album.
MW: Well, have you seen The Curse of Oak Island?
Socrates: That History Channel show? It’s great. I thought nobody else but me watched it, because it’s on opposite Downton Abbey.
MW: Yeah, it’s pretty much the most amazing show in the world. You’ve got these two brothers, and they’re searching for treasure on this island in Canada where people have been digging for treasure for two hundred years. There are all these weird rocks, and shafts, and booby traps, so they know something’s down there, but nobody knows what. Could be the Ark of the Covenant. Could just be garden variety pirate treasure. There’s an old guy who’s been living on the island, digging there for sixty years. His wife just died, and he shows up to the dig one day wearing her hat.
Socrates: That killed me, that part.
MW: And the older brother’s obviously obsessed. He’s convinced that whatever’s down there is at least as good as the Ark of the Covenant. You get the feeling he might actually be a little disappointed if it turns out that’s all it is. But he doesn’t have any money. Probably exactly because he’s that kind of guy. His little brother’s the one with the cash. So the older brother’s got to convince his little brother that it’s worth throwing millions down this hole. But the big brother’s still the big brother, right? Nothing’s ever really going to change that.
Socrates: Nothing can.
MW: And there’s one scene in particular. They’re pretty sure they’ve found gold under this big swamp. The diver can’t get past this big pad of, like, rocks and roots and junk. So the big brother goes wading in and starts pulling out all this vegetable matter, so the diver can get a look at the treasure. And he kind of looks sideways at the little brother. And the little brother sighs, and says, “do you want me in there?” And the big brother says, “Yes.” And the little brother jumps in the mud, with all his clothes on. That’s pretty much exactly what it’s like to record a Wallace Bros. album.
Socrates: Wait, do they find anything?
MW: No.
CW: Not yet.
Socrates: I see you had the great privilege of working with Fred Thomas on this record.
CW: Fred was amazing. He came into the studio after work. He listened to each song once, and then he sat down and played perfect takes. He learned my song faster than I did.
Socrates: You can actually hear his voice there at the end, in some of the studio banter.
CW: That’s not banter. It’s a poem. Maybe the greatest love poem anyone ever wrote.
Socrates: Would you say you’ve learned anything over the past ten years?
MW: We learned what compression is.
CW: I still don’t know what compression is.
MW: Well, when we first started neither of us had any idea. We were like, what’s this? That sounds pretty good. And then Carey would be like, “compress it again.”
CW: Our first Valentine’s Single, I made Mark turn up his bass until it was feeding back like crazy and the track was nothing but that and my voice and a drum machine.
MW: And guitar feedback.
CW: That guitar feedback was killer. I think it destroyed the car stereo in my convertible. But this year, the songs actually kind of sound like songs. Like, maybe even a little better than we imagined.
MW: If you keep doing stuff, it seems like you get better at it.
CW: We never expected to be any good. We just never stopped.
MW: The Wallace Bros: “We don’t give up.”
CW: We’re still here. Which I’ve also heard is one of the secrets of love.
Socrates: I can’t help noticing that, although you define this release as a Valentine’s Day ‘single,’ it actually contains three tracks.
MW: No, there are two tracks, like on any single. But then there’s a hidden track.
Socrates: Well, yes, but you sent them out in three separate emails. So how hidden would you really say it is?
CW: I mean, if you want to get technical about it, there are four tracks. Because “Love Will Find You” is actually a medley of two Fred Thomas songs. But we didn’t expect to record three songs when we went into the studio. Mark and I just started singing “First Star” as we drove up, and as soon as we walked in the door, we recorded it. That was our first take, our warm-up for the whole session. Do you remember the first time we ever heard it?
MW: Oh, yeah, man. Fred was playing a show with Royal City in this Detroit gallery someone had made out of an abandoned storefront, with more space in abandoned semi-trailers in the garden out back.
CW: We were the only people in the audience. Just us two. In the whole room. And Fred came in with his red guitar, and he was like, ‘I’ve got this new song,’ and then he played it, and I was like, what do you mean, new song? I mean, it’s impossible that song didn’t exist before. How did we all live so long without it?
Socrates: Still, three songs. It’s not really a single, is it. And it’s not exactly an EP, either.
MW: To tell you the truth, I can’t say I’m real excited about the whole idea of a Valentine’s Day ‘Single.’ I mean, I started really thinking about that this year, and I realized, it’s pretty strange, you know, putting out two songs on Valentine’s Day, and calling it a ‘single.’ Wouldn’t it make more sense to call it a ‘couple?’ It really started to worry me, man. Like, maybe we’ve been jinxing ourselves all these years, celebrating a ‘single’ on Valentine’s Day instead of a ‘couple.’ The way Detroit parades those Italian masks up and down Woodward on Thanksgiving. The Italians sold them to us because its bad luck to use them more than once. So what do we do? We parade these bad luck charms up and down the city’s main artery, every year.
CW: There are some undeniable correspondences between our romantic histories and the history of Detroit.
Socrates: Hubris, abandonment, and desolation?
CW: We did an interview a few years ago where we were saying the best Valentine’s Day we’d ever had was when I was fifteen and Mark was twelve, at the Replacements show at Hill Auditorium. I was thinking about it this year, and I thought, you know, that’s still true. But how is that possible? I mean, just playing the odds, you’d expect one Valentine’s Day to pan out in the course of almost forty years. But I’ve never had a good one. And that can’t be an accident. It must be some kind of choice. Maybe it’s even a talent.
MW: For what?
Socrates: Your press materials make quite a big deal of the fact that this is your seventh release in ten years. But I actually count eight Valentine’s Day singles in your catalog.
CW: Yeah, well, it’s also been eleven years, from 2004 to 2014. So if you want the real percentage, it’d be more like 73%.
MW: But we never really released one of the singles. 2006. Carey made the cover art, but she didn’t even put it up on the website until something like October.
CW: Yeah, and I don’t think we made any actual copies, either. If we did, we didn’t give them to anybody.
Socrates: And you didn’t actually write the bulk of this album, either. Three out of four of the songs are credited to Fred Thomas.
CW: Well, we’ve spent a lot of time nodding to our influences. But Fred isn’t just an influence. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be a band.
Socrates: What makes you say that?
CW: Fred basically created a world where it seemed like anyone had the right to make music. And it didn’t have to be perfect. He was just like, get it down on tape. To everyone. There was a while there where he was releasing an album a week, this cassette series, every week a whole new record, from a different band. So we learned to fall in love with all the imperfections and mistakes. They didn’t keep us from making something else. They made us want to make even more, to see what weird sounds would come out next.
MW: And he’s so f***ing good himself.
CW: Yeah, that was actually kind of a problem. It got so I didn’t want to take Mark to Fred’s shows anymore, because every time we went to one, Mark would ceremonially quit the Wallace Bros., on the grounds that there was no point in making any more music because Fred had already done everything worth doing, better than we ever could.
MW: I wasn’t kidding. I’m still not in the band.
CW: Well, the thing is, it’s kind of true.
Socrates: How do you mean?
CW: I just mean, there’s a point when everything starts to feel familiar. I was going through something this year. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll write a song about it. And then I realized, I already wrote a song about this. I mean, there’s only so many ways you can write a song that basically says, “Wow, I wish that had turned out differently.”
MW: And then there are only so many ways you can wish it were different. I wish I never met you. I wish you’d come back.
CW: All of the above.
MW: And then you listen to the songs other people have written. Like really, do we need any other songs after Tom Waits writes “Downtown Train?”
CW: Or the Temptations write “Can’t Get Next To You?” Or Solomon Burke sings “Don’t Give Up on Me?”
MW: We figured, with a single like “I’ve Seen It All Before,” it didn’t really make sense to include an original as the B-side. It kind of goes against the point.
CW: And the other thing is, all my old songs, all Fred’s songs, they still work. And that’s not bad. It’s actually beautiful. The world, it might throw the same things at you, over and over. Maybe that never stops.
MW: But the songs, they always tell you someone else out there knows exactly how you feel.
CW: And no matter what the world does, the music still works, too.