Wonderlick Photo credit: David Zayas
Wonderlick, the duo of Jay Blumenfield and Tim Quirk, both founding members of 20th century alt-rock outfit Too Much Joy, is releasing their latest album, Wonderlick Loves You on October 9 via People Suck Music. Listen to it first at The Big Takeover.
Inspired by two wildly successful (artistically and economically) house show tours and binge-watching Les Blank documentaries, they wanted their next LP to capture the sense of immediacy and abandon those acoustic house shows had fostered. They hired a mobile recording engineer and fiddler named Mike Mitchell in Floyd, Virginia, a tiny Appalachian town where every other citizen just so happens to be a virtuoso player of old-time music.
Mike assembled a stellar crew of locals: banjo players, an upright bassist, a drummer, a clog dancer. The idea was to find out what happens when you teach old-time musicians your punk-y songs. Best case: invent a new genre that somehow sounds like it’s been around for centuries.
They cut five songs the first day. Eight more the next. As the sessions progressed, the local musicians stopped following the chord charts and started inventing. Mike heard string quartet parts and plugged in his electric fiddle when a song demanded it.
The result is Wonderlick Loves You, an album that has all the immediacy and abandon they’d been reaching for, as well as an undercurrent of woe they hadn’t expected but probably should have been prepared for. It’s not a folk record so much as a Wonderlick record played with folk instruments.
Wonderlick started in 2001 as a side project for Jay Blumenfield and Tim Quirk, who’d spent the previous two decades in Too Much Joy — a band that got arrested in Miami for playing 2 Live Crew songs, charted on Billboard’s Modern Rock, earned an A− from noted critic Robert Christgau, and never recouped a dime from Warner Bros.
New music on the way? Pitch Big Takeover Exclusives.
