It was during the long, strange months of the early lockdown that Kevin Whelan and Charles Bissell’s 30-year friendship finally unravelled. The two middle-aged former housemates from New Jersey had been going through a private falling-out over the future of their cult indie band, The Wrens. However, it took the world shuddering to a halt for Whelan to at last understand what he needed to do. Which was to embark on the nuclear option of putting The Wrens on hold to launch a new project, Aeon Station, whose debut album, Observatory, arrives this month.
“I’ve only ever wanted The Wrens,” says Whelan (51) over Zoom from his living room. “But there were new stipulations or demands on what would be required to then be in The Wrens or to be The Wrens. And in good faith, at this moment, given Covid and all, I wasn’t ready to accept these new things that we had never had for 30 years. It wasn’t ready for that.”
For three decades Whelan and Bissell had guided The Wrens through rhapsodic triumphs and heartbreaking lows. Their struggles culminated in 2003’s The Meadowlands, a masterpiece credited with inspiring Arcade Fire’s Funeral and that was almost certainly an influence on The National. Yet by 2020, with sustained success still a mirage on the horizon, long-running disagreements between the duo over the timeline for a Meadowlands follow-up had splintered into tectonic fault-lines.
His patience at an end, Whelan decided to press ahead on his own. He announced the songs he had written for The Wrens would be released as Aeon Station (“aeon” for the length of time he had toiled on the material, “station” for his present station in life). Joining him on the new project were Wrens guitarist and his brother Greg Whelan and drummer Jerry MacDonald. Left out in the cold was Bissell, still sitting on the tracks for a fourth Wrens LP that may now never come to pass.
“It was Covid,” says Whelan. “Covid and the sense that time is precious. There was a constant wait. A constant, perpetual … ‘it’s going to be done, it’s about to be done’.”
Beatles dynamic
Whelan blushes when I bring up Lennon and McCartney. And yet it is tempting to see the creative dynamic between him and Bissell as similar to that between the two Beatles. He and his bandmate wrote separately and then brought their material to The Wrens, so that the line-up could together apply the finishing tweaks. And, like Macca and Lennon, they presented a contrast in personalities: Whelan the more avuncular and spontaneous, Bissell intense and withdrawn.
“That’s emblematic of many bands or creative processes,” says Whelan. “Or even with businesses partners. A lot of people have been watching that Beatles documentary and it’s mind-blowing to see the chaos in which they could still produce.”
Observatory wouldn’t work, of course, were it merely a concept album about a group breaking up. And so it encompasses life, the universe and everything. Whelan ruminates on the death of his father, 20 years ago, and his own struggles with growing older and the realisation that his dream of “making it” commercially as a musician has receded in the rear-view mirror. And he touches on his relationship with his two sons, aged 10 and eight, and challenges and joys of parenting a child with autism (“Observatory” refers to his experience of watching his neurodivergent younger son watching the world).
“When I started writing some of these songs and these demos, I was single,” he says. “And then getting married and having two children and navigating work … The 40s are a tricky time. They don’t give you a heads-up when you’re in your 20s.”
Aeon Station takes up where The Wrens left off, using folk and acoustic rock as building blocks upon which to construct vast, weeping palisades of angst. The formula is executed to perfection on recent single Queens, which opens with Whelan cooing from inside a cocoon of feedback before the roof comes off and a deluge of guitars sweeps through. One of the inspirations was the Winner Takes it All by Abba, with which it shares an autumnal ache.
“Your narrative is so different in your 40s,” he says. “These emotions are what I was trying to capture on the record, where there are so many ups and downs that you’ve never expected.”
Self-sabotage
As he is well aware, things could have worked out differently for The Wrens had they chased the spotlight with greater ruthlessness. But they refused to play the game or compromise their principles. Such idealism occasionally verged on self-sabotage. They turned down an offer to work with the manager of The Flaming Lips and rejected overtures from the DreamWorks A&R man who later signed Elliott Smith (nobody’s idea of a sell-out).
Most notoriously of all, they had a falling-out with music executive Alan Meltzer, who in the mid-1990s offered The Wrens a million dollar contract, on the understanding they write slightly catchier songs. They declined. So he instead signed Creed and Evanescence and turned them into rock stars.
“We never got great success. It is a unique story. I was in my 20s and early 30s we were offered this million-dollar contract that we walked away from. And it led from nothing to nothing to nothing.”
Nothing did finally lead to something, however. The Meadowlands became a slow-burn phenomenon following its release in September 2003. NME praised its “raw emotionalism”. Pitchfork, in a 9.5 review, swooned over “the first-hand accounts of the band’s own struggles”.
The problem was that by then The Wrens had moved on to the next stage of their lives. In their 30s, with spouses and children and mortgages to think about, they were not in a position to go for broke and chase the acclaim that The Meadowlands had dangled before them. Whelan, his brother Greg and drummer MacDonald had all embarked on serious careers. Only Bissell remained committed to music (in addition to being a stay-at-home parent, with his wife – a corporate executive – as bread-winner).
Success for Kevin and Greg meant high-flying jobs in the pharmaceutical sector. Kevin worked for Pfizer and is today a director at Johnson & Johnson, where he manages 400 people. Yet they also tried to keep The Wrens ticking over, often flying to Europe for weekend gigs and then jetting back to New Jersey to report for work on Monday morning.
Irish holidays
This was a slog, but it allowed them to travel the world and bring their music to their fans. The Wrens were particularly thrilled to play Whelan’s in Dublin in 2007. Kevin and Greg’s roots are in Roscommon; in their youth the brothers spent extensive periods on the family farm back in the old country.
“We played Whelan’s on a Thursday night. It was just the four of us. We flew into Ireland. We were not a band of tour managers or any of that stuff. We were by ourselves. And we were in Dublin and my brother was walking down the street and got hit by a car. We’d had breakfast. He’s crossing the street and he got hit by the car and went up on the hood and everything. It was pretty punk rock. It was literally in front of Whelan’s. And he was like, ‘I’m all right … I can do the gig!”
Bissell, it is worth noting, has disputed the assertion that he placed impossible demands on the rest of The Wrens. “His [Whelan’s] story is that I worked on the album for too long, but that simultaneously somehow I also had nothing to do with [the Aeon Station] songs,” Bissell said in a statement in early December. “I suddenly found myself being portrayed as often as not as the baddie, as if I had somehow held him back, intentionally or at least thoughtlessly and selfishly even, which I’ve gotta say, was really confusing and weird.”
Whoever is right, it’s been ugly watching the row play out in the pages of the New York Times, the Guardian and elsewhere. Does Whelan have regrets about how it has unfolded?
“I’ve said in every interview and I will say it every time: with my heart, I am in the band,” says Whelan. “I always have been. It’s been part of my life. And it has guided decisions in my life for 30 years. Relationships, jobs, where I live. All that kind of stuff. I’m always hopeful, right? I want the next Wrens record as much as anyone. I’ve always been the biggest fan of the band in the band.”
Observatory by Aeon Station is released on December 10th
