The Waxwings toured with Guided By Voices, Travis, Matthew Sweet, The Strokes, and fellow Detroit band The White Stripes.
[1][2] The band was formed by Dean Fertita, after a friend booked a show for him at Arlene's Grocery in New York five days later.
The band's name, as well as the name of their debut record, was derived from the first line of a poem in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire:[6] I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpanePreviously, Fertita, Romano and Peyok had played together in the shoegaze band Glider along with The Sights' Mike Trombley.
The album was released on May 2, 2000, to positive reviews from critics: The Waxwings don't so much re-create the past as learn from it; their acid-tweaked tunefulness is broad enough to embrace lullaby wistfulness ("Sleepy Head"), twang-pop ("Firewood") and jaunty orchestrations ("Low Ceiling")Low to the Ground was featured in Magnet Magazine's Top 20 albums of 2000-2001.
After hearing Shadows Of... through mutual friend Matt Smith (of Outrageous Cherry), Rainbow Quartz Records offered to free the Waxwings from their contract with Bobsled.
Their third album, Let's Make Our Descent was recorded with Brendan Benson at Grand Studio in Detroit, and released on August 13, 2004.
We were new to the label and didn't really stand up for ourselves early on.The news page of the Waxwings official site states that the band has begun working on songs for the fourth album.
[17] In Spring 2007, Dean Fertita joined Queens of the Stone Age as the keyboardist for their sixth record, Era Vulgaris, taking over for Natasha Shneider.