After a few years of grinding in the bustling Los Angeles comedy scene, Wolves of Glendale are dead set on making their mark on a grander scale. Now, as they have the opportunity to do just that with a full slate of songs to share, they bring with them a pack mentality toward delivering a top-notch live experience that transcends their meticulously crafted take on gallows humor as they trek across the country.
Making their way to The Middle East Upstairs in Cambridge on Sunday (February 18) in support of their eponymous debut album, the comedy music trio composed of Tom McGovern, Eric Jackowitz, and Ethan Edenburg brings far more to the stage than what might meet the eye. Rooted deep underneath the plethora of catchy hooks and verses about shitting yourself, and other outlandishly clever perspectives that permeate their introductory 10-song slate, is a lifelong passion for musical chemistry delivered by artists entrenched in their craft, all while sharing a rare mutual love and respect for many of the same musical and comedy avenues, and as a result, a creative vision that combines that very appreciation of music and theatre for an all-out experience of comedic chaos and sonic precision.
Vanyaland recently had a chance to get the band on the horn in anticipation of their visit to the area – a full circle moment for two-thirds of the band, as Edenburg and Jackowitz attended Berklee College of Music – and to talk about the many creative elements that have inspired and sculpted their first album, their first tour, and what the view from the wolf den looks like as they continue to work toward the future. Check it out.
Vanyaland: I’m so glad we could connect to chat about the new album. I’m stoked that it’s out, so I can only imagine how you guys are feeling. From your perspectives, what is the overall vibe about this milestone now that the debut album is out there and people have been able to listen to it and give feedback?
Tom McGovern: I don’t really know where to start. I feel like, we’ve been in the tank with this thing for about a year and a half after recording the first five songs in May of 2022, so to see where the album landed based on what we had when we went in, when we had only been a band for two months at the time and then ended up getting into the studio with the very talented John Spiker of Tenacious D, we were just throwing shit at the wall in terms of the arrangements for the only five songs we had at that point, and those all ended up on the record. So to see it through to where it all ended up is pretty special with the condition it’s in now.
Eric Jackowitz: It’s weird, because we’ve lived with these songs for so long, and I think there’s something about putting them out that almost legitimizes it all in a way. Because when you play the songs in a live setting, they come out of your amplifiers and speakers, and then they kind of disappear. So, it’s kind of ethereal to have a record of a snapshot in time of what we were doing this last year and a half, and for it to sound as good as it does, it really is a milestone.
Right on. Did you have anything to add to that, Ethan?
Ethan Edenburg: Yeah, I’m quitting.
Jackowitz: He hates it!
McGovern: Yeah, he’s very unhappy with it.
Edenburg: I feel like I’m done. You gotta try stuff, ya know? So we tried, it’s a flop, and I’m out. [laughs] No, I’m extremely proud of this record, and I think it’s a huge deal for us, both as individual men and as a band. The fact that we could come together and have such a work ethic means the world to me. I grew up with records, so for me, it was always the peak to be able to buy your favorite artist’s record and then just go into that world for forty minutes and listen to it from front to back. It’s like nothing else. It’s the cinematic film version of music, so to me, there’s just nater medium, so just to have it as a thing now, and people can live in the Wolves of Glendale cave for forty minutes or so and come out th either side and either get it or wonder what the hell they just did.
Just as a matter of reflecting, aside from how long you guys have been together as a band, what sparked the idea for a comedy music trio?
Jackowitz: We’ve been a band since March 7, 2022. Ethan and I were in a previous comedy music trio called The Cooties and Tom was, and still is a brilliant solo musical comedian. We were tagged in the same Spotify playlist, and that’s how we heard of each other. As mine and Ethan’s old band was ending, Tom was moving to LA, so he hit us up, and the first day we hung out together, we wrote “Vapin’ in Vegas,” and it was this magical spark moment that we all took very seriously, because we knew how rare it is to find three people with the same musical and comedy tastes so closely. It was quite a magical, fateful day.
Of course, the foundation of these songs is rooted in the comedic element, but it’s also obvious that the music itself is taken seriously. It doesn’t sound cheap or tacky. What were some of the creative or musical inspirations as you built onto your catalog with singles and the songs you would post on socials, and as you worked toward putting the full album together?
Jackowitz: I feel like the venn diagram between the three of us is like The Strokes, The Killers, and Daft Punk, with several offshoots of all of those that we’re all familiar with and love, but there’s definitely elements of retro, modern, alternative rock, a synth-y thing, and a vocoder thing all in one here. So, if you had to boil it down to those pillars, you could, but I also don’t want ot speak for these guys.
Edenburg: I thought it was well said.
McGovern: I wouldn’t change a thing about that, Eric.
Edenburg: Except for maybe the annoying voice it was said in.
McGovern: If you sounded more like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Morgan Freeman, I’d have a much better time.
Edenburg: Can you try it with a Morgan Freeman voice?
McGovern: Try it again Eric, from the top?
Jackowitz: [Morgan Freeman impression] The four musical pillars of the Wolves of Glendale…
Edenburg: Much better.
Jackowitz: [still in Freeman voice] Number one is Andy Dufresne.
Obviously, this is your first album, but did the extended time between releasing the singles and putting songs out on social media over the course of the year or two help you better prepare for the process that came along with putting the full album together?
Jackowitz: I don’t think so, honestly. I feel like we look at it as two different things. We utilized social media in short form to maximize the most effect, and that’s also just another comedy music muscle that we like to exercise. Our album isn’t parodies. I mean, we love doing parodies and we love Weird Al, so that works on social media, so let’s do that. But when it came to the album, we’re all musicians first, I would say. We’re all producers in our own right, so we looked at it separately. But I will say, with the more recent songs in the live trio setup, like “I Barf” and “Cocaine,” we sort of use those one-minute jumping off points, and they’ve done well, so now it gets us thinking maybe that’s a three or four minute song on album two.
McGovern: That’s kind of the beauty of social media, and making comedy songs for social media. It’s kind of like a hack, because you don’t need to spend six hours writing a full three-minute song. You can write a forty-five second tune like we did with “I Barf,” and if people think it rips, then we know that when we have the time, we’re gonna go back and flesh that out, so it’s almost like a sample test.
You mentioned how you had the first five songs written early on, and then the other five came later. But were there more songs that were written, but just didn’t make the cut? If so, do those songs in the vault give you any inspiration as to what a second album might look like down the line?
Edenburg: We have a few songs brewing in the tank, all in different levels of completion, but as far as the next one, I think it’s going to be more of the same, kind of, but I also think it would be more cohesive. At least right now, the plan is to write out another batch of songs, and record it all in one studio with one producer. When we were first doing it, and this kind of relates to everything we did as a band for the first year or so, it was all sort ‘let’s do this thing now, because we have the song ready, so let’s just play the song, I guess,’ then the next week we would put it out because it was done. It was all working very hard, but it wasn’t five steps ahead, whereas now, we’re very blessed to have an incredible team and we’re treating this like a very legitimate enterprise, so now we’re trying to map things out into 2025. It feels really good to see that we’ll have this amount of time to write, and we can try out the songs on the road, and then we’re gonna go to a studio and book out time and record everything at once. It’s gonna be a lot of stupid songs, but they’ll be a lot of stupid fockin’ songs.
Jackowitz: I also think there’s a blessing of being a comedy band where, as opposed to Bruce Springsteen writing eighty songs for Born To Run, or Tom Petty writing one hundred-fifty songs for Wildflowers, we can go to a comedy club the day after we write a song and see if it works. I think we were just doing that naturally, without even thinking of the record. There were a few iterations of songs, like “The Gym,” which we re-wrote the lyrics to, like, four times and one of those versions had nothing to do with the gym, but the music was the same. To hone all of that in by going to comedy clubs for a year, then to funnel it all into ten songs that we know work live, or are listenable and good is actually a blessing rather than taking a gamble on writing twenty songs that we won’t know if they’ll work. Instead, we played them in front of audiences for a year, so we know that they worked.
Edenburg: I like the idea of Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty going to a small club and singing a song about a break-up and thinking ‘it didn’t seem like they cared too much about it, but they were into the groove though. It was a song about my father, but it’s the same melody. So’ I’m going to rewrite it and come back.’
Ethan, you mentioned a little bit ago about going out on the road and delivering these songs in a live setting. With that, of course, there is more than one “first” for you guys, and another one is the national tour you’re bringing to The Middle East in Cambridge on February 18. How does it feel to be embarking on, quite literally, new territory with this tour?
Edenburg: I am extraordinarily psyched up to hit the road. We’ve done little traveling out and touring, but we’ve just absolutely had a fantastic time, a super blast if you will, and it’s really trippy being able to show up to a city that we’ve never been to, and two hundred people come to the show and know the words to the songs, or they’re throwing stuffed animals at us during “Olivia” or something. It’s just overwhelmingly exciting and cool. Not to mention, the show in Cambridge is a really full circle moment for Eric and I because we were in a rock band while we were going to college at Berklee, and we played there several times literally a decade ago. It’s gonna be a real head trip as a fully grown adult man and play songs about shitting.
Hell yeah, two-thirds of Wolves of Glendale and Eric Andre carrying the Berklee torch in comedy.
Edenburg: If he reads this, he can feel free to jump on bass with us any time.
Jackowitz: He’s also from the town that Ethan and I are from in Florida.
McGovern: And I did not go to Berklee, but I used to know a bunch of Shakespeare monologues, but I no longer know them.
That’s interesting that you mention your Shakespeare background, because there is also a stage performance element to a Wolves of Glendale show. How does that play into your approach to delivering these songs in a live setting?
McGovern: To me, what is most exciting about this tour and what people in Cambridge and every other city to this tour will see, and it’s one of the most beautiful things about being in a comedy band, is that you almost immediately get a free pass to basically do whatever the hell you want, and people will be there for it. We’re actually in the middle of potentially going back and changing some of the non-scripted bits, but we’re also trying to string a narrative. It really helps keep people engaged during a full hour or seventy-five minute show in a way that, if you go to see another band, you just don’t get that type of thing.
We played The Troubadour for our album release show, and a friend of mine that had never seen the band before came up and told me it was the fastest one-hour show he had ever seen because his brain was engaged the entire time. Normally, in between songs, the band will do a big finish hit, then it’ll be a great song, then there’s forty-five seconds of silence and everyone kind of chatters and moves around. Maybe an hour and a half in, you get kind of fatigued with that, but with us, you never really quite know what’s going to happen from one song to the next. As an example, we literally just choreographed and scored a two-minute fight sequence in which we include sound effects, and have essentially written a dance to, but it’s a fight. And we get to just do that because we’re in a comedy band, so as a long answer to your question, the theatrical element is just an added bonus of being part of a band like this, and it’s one of the most fun parts of being able to take the show out.
Edenburg: It’s like a fight ballet, if you will.
There you go. A nice balance of two dramatic, heavy things with ballet and fight scenes. Two of the most intense you could do on stage, but not the top two most intense.
McGovern: That would probably be shitting and pissing.
Edenburg: That would suck.
I mean, given the subject matter of some of the songs, that could be the grand finale.
Jackowitz: Yeah, Tom, you should do that.
McGovern: It would be a spotlight moment where I tell everyone I have a BA, then I take a huge dump on stage.
Edenburg: Sounds great. Eric and I will be in the green room having Jersey Mike’s.
That’s a vibe, Ethan. You guys will be having it Mike’s way, and The Middle East Upstairs could, in a weird turn of events, have it Tom’s way.
Jackowitz: You don’t want it Tom’s way, trust me.
McGovern: You don’t know what you’re asking for.
On that note, this has been a really great chat. We’ve talked about so much here. A lot of great first, big steps for you guys, and it feels like things are just getting started. The work and time that you’ve put in is paying off in a whole bunch of ways, of course, but in a more specific spirit, what are you looking forward to most about making your way to the city with this experience, and setting the Wolves of Glendale footprint here?
Edenburg: For me, it’s definitely about getting that honorary doctorate at Berklee. I assume they will invite Eric and I to give some sort of speech, conference or seminar of some sort at the BPC. So I will assume we’ll do that, and I’ve been writing a bunch of interesting and inspiring stuff to talk about there. I’m not sure how much time Tom has spent in Boston, but I know for Eric and I, it holds a really special place in our hearts. It was a very important and formative time for us in so many ways, and there’s obviously a long history of comedy in Boston, as well, so it’s just huge. It’s important to us that we leave our mark, ya know?
McGovern: We’re just mostly excited for Dunkin’ in its homeland, so that’ll be cool.
Jackowitz: Is Boloco still there?
Edenburg: I’ll check.
McGovern: It’s pronounced “Four Loko.”
Edenburg: Yes, it’s still there, Eric.
Jackowitz: Oh, okay. I can’t wait to chug a Four Loko in zero degree weather. And I’ll have a buffalo chicken burrito.
Edenburg: We’re all going to have buffalo chicken burritos at Boloco, then we’re going to take the T all over town.
Jackowitz: Yeah, we’re gonna take the T until 11:30, and it’s also going to be only two cars long, so we’re gonna be [squishing noise] in there.
McGovern: Eating Boloco and drinking Four Loko.
Jackowitz: Then we’re gonna go to the Gourmet Dumpling House in Chinatown, because that place was the shit.
WOLVES OF GLENDALE :: Sunday, February 18 at Middle East Upstairs, 472 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, MA :: 7 p.m., $18 :: Advance tickets