Henry David Thoreau once wrote, in part, that he went to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Well, Wolves of Glendale went to the woods too, but they used their time to write a whole album full of playful bangers about aspirations of cannibalism and the culinary dominance of chicken parm — so you decide who the real poets are.
With their second full-length album, Go To The Woods, the comedy rock trio returns from an all-too-literal exploration of their own creative wilderness with 15 new tracks that delve into the deep foliage of absurdity while only further showcasing the band’s collective hunger for not only making people laugh, but also fully nerding out on the production element of the experience and delivering top-notch music as, in the case of guitarist Ethan Edenburg and drummer Eric Jackowitz, Berklee-trained artists have been known to do.
With a wide range of storylines that include, but are not limited to the perils and eventual redemption of owning reptiles, to the definitive and delightfully violent discovery of popcorn, the Wolves have fully honed in on what really makes them tick as musicians and songwriters, as frontman Tom McGovern specifies the importance of their intentionality as they effectively laugh in the face of the oft-dreaded “sophomore slump.”
“Personally, it feels amazing because it’s only our second album, but it’s also our first opportunity to intentionally write an album of songs from start to finish, knowing that those songs were going to be on the same album,” McGovern tells Vanyaland. “We started writing our first album when we had only been a band for maybe two months, so not only did we not know each other’s voices as intimately as we do now, but we were just adding songs to that album as they were written. This time, we took six months off, wrote twenty songs and narrowed it down to our favorite fifteen, and we wrote them intentionally in one batch.”
As well, the band expanded their instrumental repertoire as Jackowitz was able to get behind a bonafide drum kit this go-around, and in the spirit of being more deliberate in how they approached this batch of songs as opposed to their first record, the band literally ventured into the woods to record under the most intimate circumstances for ten straight days with rock and roll super producer John Spiker. From nine in the morning to 11 at night, the guys worked themselves ragged to cultivate the album, with the strides and new directions they took proving to only make their bond as friends and musicians stronger, and the final product more potent than they could have imagined.
“We played a lot on the first record, and the whole tour cycle following it, with Eric on his SPD-S drum pad, and then when we were recording this album, we had a studio space where Eric could actually play drums. Of course, Eric is one of the best drummers on the planet, so as soon as he started playing drums, Tom and I wanted to rock out,” says Edenburg. “This album became a lot more of a rock album simply because Eric upgraded to a full drum set. From there, it was very much ‘let’s make all of our dreams come true,’ and we wanted to pay homage to our favorite artists, which revolved largely around Green Day, Foo Fighters, The Killers, and other stuff that has a little more umph to it. It felt almost silly not to do that once Eric was behind the kit.”
With a myriad of new elements within arm’s reach, whether that’s a bigger overall sound, a significant change in how much McGovern plays guitar on stage now, how that change brings out his inner 11 year old (which is, oddly enough, the same body weight as his current 34-year old form for anyone curious) or just fully committing to the bit when it comes to delivering a solid rock album and live show, there’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to what the trio is building.
They’ve also made a concerted effort to bolster their live presentation with visuals, which will be on full display when the band hits up The Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge on Thursday (September 10) as part of their ongoing tour’s first leg.
Part of those updated visual elements have come in the form of music videos, as well, particularly for “Reptile Guy” and “My Uncle Got a Hot Tub,” which were directed in house for the first time by Edenburg and Jackowitz, respectively. While Edenburg worked with VFX artists from the Saturday Night Live team among a smattering of others, Jackowitz flexed his genre-bending muscle again following the success of his own short horror parody film, The Seeing Eye Dog Who Saw Too Much, which garnered the Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year.
With all of the revamped creative force they’ve pumped into this album and tour cycle, the guys are just excited to bring it to a live setting and deliver laughs and riffs that will aim to land even heavier than before.
“For the first time ever, we’re using video components to all of our songs, which as you know for comedy music, is so important to be able to see a visual element to help sell the joke,” says McGovern. “We’re proud of these songs because you don’t need a visual element to laugh at them and understand the story and have the jokes hit, but to see a McDonald’s logo as we scream about going to McDonald’s, or to be able to see a viking while we’re talking about the viking who discovered popcorn by beheading a king in the street, it makes it all a lot funnier. Those were things we didn’t have access to the first two tours because we were pretty dumb back then, but now we’re really smart.”
The music is obviously the driving force behind what the Wolves do. However, with a multi-faceted stage show and multimedia approach, Edenburg also stresses the importance of the band’s penchant for breaking out their improv chops in a live setting, which serves to keep both the crowd and themselves in the moment by crafting songs on the spot — a muscle they flexed previously as part of their Iron Songwriter series.
Now that they’ve figured out a way to play their long-requested fan favorite deep cut “Shrimp” live, which will inevitably lead the charge for promoting peace amongst world leaders along the road to global harmony as far as the band is concerned, there’s no telling where the band can go or stopping them along the way.
That persistence and certainly no shortage of musical inspiration to pull from when exploring the next thing is what continues to fuel the band as they only continue to grow their fanbase while growing themselves. It’s all rooted in a common shared addiction amongst artists, as Edenburg puts it, to simply create and truly enjoy the process of it all, which will then, in turn, continue to open creative doors for the band as they seek to leave no stone unturned and no topic left unexplored in whatever direction they take their next project.
“I don’t think we’ll ever run out of things to write and sing about, just because the playground is so vast and wide when it comes to things in life we could talk about, just like any other comedian,” says Jackowitz. “Who says the next album won’t be just a straight up metal album, or we go through a jazz period or something like that. There is a world where we could just repeat ourselves, but we’re too excited by music and we honestly get bored really easily, and we don’t like repeating ourselves.”
WOLVES OF GLENDALE :: Thursday, September 10 at The Middle East Downstairs, 472 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, MA :: 7 p.m., 18-plus, $33.44 :: Event Info