THE WALLACE BROS. CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP

For Immediate Release -- With six studio albums, dozens of singles and EPs, over a hundred songs, and an exhausting litany of failed celebrity romances, mob violence, and public humiliation, industry speculation was strong that the Wallace Bros. would bow off the stage into a dignified retirement following the release of their tenth anniversary Valentines Day Single in 2014.

The rumors were given credence by Mark’s foray into a seemingly traditional rock and roll afterlife, as founder of Wallace Detroit Guitars, which repurposes wood from Detroit’s abandoned buildings into one-of-a-kind instruments. And by Carey’s abrupt disappearance from the international party circuit where she’d once seemed to be an almost permanent fixture, as confessor, court jester, and den mother to a range of friends and lovers that reportedly included the poets Kenny Chesney and Eminem, underground DJ Idris Elba, and the late, great Paul Walker.

Those rumors were conclusively laid to rest on Valentine’s Day 2015 with the release of the Wallace Bros. ninth Valentine’s Day Single, a dizzying pastiche of almost a dozen covers, presented as three tracks that together comprise just under a scant six minutes of actual music. 

Far from a decorous retreat into twilight years, The Wallace Bros. celebratory Valentine’s Day show was a no-holds-barred romp that some reviewers described as “brave” and “ground-breaking” and others termed “a desperate bid for relevance.” It featured pyrotechnic displays so intense they interfered with cell phone coverage in several surrounding counties and a grand finale that involved several dozen big cats and antelope, the inmates of an amateur and possibly illegal Midwestern zoo, being gently dropped from a crop duster onto the audience in a series of gaudy handmade parachutes.

Animal rights groups offered strenuous protests, but Carey insisted to the press that the stunt was not an act of cruelty, either to the animals or the audience, but art. “It’s a metaphor for love,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t know how we could have been more obvious.”

 Observers were also struck by a new attention to costume in the Wallace Bros. act, in particular Mark’s multiple changes, which included several ensembles that some saw as a cynical attempt to cash in on the commercial appeal of the forthcoming “Fifty Shades of Gray,” which shared a release date with the Wallace Bros. Valentine’s Day Single. 

 Mark was quick to point out, however, that his interest in what he termed “my gear” predated the “Fifty Shades” hoopla by years. In fact, he suggested, the costumes were not an afterthought, but the inspirational spark at the heart of the entire record. 

“I mean,” he told the international paparazzi gathered outside the Wallace Bros. RV as the crowd began to disperse in the small hours of dawn, “Carey was like, ‘Are you sure anyone even wants to hear this anymore?’ But I was like, ‘Then where am I going to wear this cone bra?’”

The Wallace Bros.

CBS Evening News Interview

AC: Great to see you both.  And we’re looking forward to seeing you again next week, Mark, when we run our feature on Wallace Detroit Guitars.

MW: Thanks so much, Anderson. But I’d just like to focus on the music today. I mean (thumps chest) the music is my heart.

AC: I understand.  Well, let’s talk about the music, then.  You’ve got quite the mashup this year.  Three songs in six minutes. 

CW: Really, it’s more like six or seven songs.

MW: There’s the drum beat from Oh Mickey at the beginning of Broken Heart. 

CW: And the line from Tender Shepherd at the end of Letter to Memphis.

AC: And even I can hear that there’s a bit of Taylor Swift thrown in there.  I’m sorry, but everyone’s heard the rumors, so I have to ask.  Any truth in the reports that you were involved in a fling with her this winter?

MW: (aggrieved) Fling. What an ugly word to use for such a beautiful thing.

CW: We agreed about this before taping, Anderson.

MW: It couldn’t have been farther from a “fling”. That was the problem. She just wasn’t ready for another high-profile celebrity romance. She kept telling me, if only you were less famous. Or less talented. 

CW: Anderson. Didn’t we agree we weren’t going to talk about this?

MW: Or even less handsome.

CW: I was the one who suggested adding the Taylor Swift, actually.

AC: Really?

CW: It’s just an incredibly profound statement on the source of art. I mean, I spent the last two years writing fifty-five thousand words on the topic, in my own blood. And Taylor Swift gets it all across in a single bridge.

AC: It’s interesting you talk about the source of art. Because none of the songs you sing this year are originals.

MW: Oh yeah, man, but those are the originals.  That’s where it all comes from.

AC: So do you feel like, as you look back over your career, you’re returning to the beginning?

MW: No, man. It’s like Bob Dylan. He starts out singing other people’s songs. And forty years later, he’s singing them again. You don’t start playing because you want to sing your own songs. You start out because you want to be Woody Guthrie. Or Bob Dylan. Or Taylor Swift. They teach you how to sing your own songs. And once you sing enough of your own, you’re finally ready to sing theirs. Have you heard the new Dylan album, man? Where he sings Some Enchanted Evening? Or Lucky Old Sun? I’m not sure he’s ever recorded anything better.

CW: It’s like that Borges story, where the guy spends his whole life writing a single page of Don Quixote.

MW: It’s not a retreat to sing your hero’s songs. It’s the big dream. It’s the logical conclusion. It’s the victory.

CW: That’s what the Wallace Bros. are working towards.  But for us, it won’t be Sinatra covers.  It’ll be the entire Oklahoma! soundtrack.

AC: Oklahoma!?

CW: Yep. Mark already knows the whole thing.  You can start him anywhere in the show, and he’ll just sing and sing.

AC: Anywhere?

CW: Go ahead, try it.

AC: (sings) It ain’t so much a question of not knowing what to do..

MW: I’ve knowed what’s right and wrong since I was ten.

AC: (still singing) I’ve heerd a lot of stories and I reckon they are true..

MW: About how girls are put upon by men. I know I mustn’t fall into the pit.. but when I’m with a fellow (stands, grins, throws arms wide) I forget!!!  (begins box step) I’m just a girl who can’t say no..

AC: Remarkable.

MW: (reverses box step) With or without the mistletoe..

AC: He’ll just go on like this? 

CW: All day.

AC: And at the end of this song..?

CW: He’ll start the next one. In order. Til the end. Mark. We need to finish the interview. Mark. 

AC: Well, it’s interesting that you see performing covers as a way to emulate your heroes. Because I can’t help noticing that, in the strictest sense of the word, they aren’t actually true covers.

MW: What do you mean by that?

AC: Well, you’ve changed some of the words, haven’t you? In Letter to Memphis for instance. You sing, “across the ocean sea.” The actual lyric is “across the ocean sailing.”

MW: No, it’s “across the ocean sea.”

AC: I’m sorry, I actually consulted with Frank Black before this interview.  He confirms that the lyric is “across the ocean sailing.”

CW: I did ask you, why would he say “ocean” and “sea”?

MW: “Across the ocean sailing?”  Those words don’t even mean anything in that order.

AC: But I do see the influence that some of your heroes must have had on you. The second verse of the Tom Petty track, for instance. Those lines are so much like yours they almost sound like they belong in a Wallace Bros. song.

CW: Well, those actually are Wallace Bros. lyrics. We swapped out some of his, because they weren’t any good.

MW:  That whole song, man, it’s great, but it’s like he never really finished it. It kind of feels like he just put out the demo.

CW: Well, some of that’s the fact that Rick Rubin produced the album. 

MW: Yeah, there’s a real fine line between a Rick Rubin album and just putting out your own demo.

AC: A line you two seem to be quite familiar with.

MW: Well, and plus it’s clear now that Tom is totally into collaborations with younger artists, with all those Grammys he just won for Sam Smith. And I think we probably changed this song up more than Sam Smith did with I Won’t Back Down.

CW: I think if you go by word count, we actually wrote more new lyrics than Sam Smith. Even though we only added two lines.

AC: Some people were surprised to see a new album from you this year.

CW: I’ve got to admit, I was surprised myself. Last year we did I’ve Seen It All Before, and that pretty much said it all for me. I mean, where do you go from there? But it turns out, as Dylan says, “When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.” The crazy thing is, there’s a kind of freedom in that. You lose enough, and you begin to realize, you can live through just about anything. You’re not afraid anymore.

MW: It’s only a broken heart.

CW: And in the end, these Valentine’s records have never really been about this romance or that. It’s always been about our friends. So why would we stop putting records out, when we haven’t stopped loving them?