[3] Brothers Greg and Kevin Whelan formed their band in the late 1980s, recruiting former high school classmate Charles Bissell in 1989 as a guitarist for a proposed gig supporting The Fixx, which was cancelled in the end.
Jerry MacDonald replaced the band's original drummer in 1990 and the quartet moved into a house together in the town of Secaucus, New Jersey, to concentrate on their music career.
[citation needed] In summer 1995 Grass Records was bought out by businessman Alan Meltzer, who wanted to refocus the label on scoring more mainstream popularity and hit songs.
During their 1996 tour for Secaucus the band was offered a new long-term contract for over a million dollars, on condition that in the future they tailor their songs to a more radio-friendly sound.
The album received overwhelmingly positive reviews from the music press, in publications such as AllMusic,[11] Pitchfork[7] and praise from critic Robert Christgau.
Despite the critical success of The Meadowlands, the band were unable to start work quickly on a follow-up album due to financial and personal constraints: Bissell had left his job in advertising to earn his living as a guitar teacher but the other three members remain in full-time employment (the Whelan brothers work for a multinational pharmaceutical company in New York City and MacDonald works in the sales division of a financial services company in Philadelphia[14]), and the band no longer had a single house where the members could demo ideas and record songs, as both Bissell and Greg Whelan had gotten married and moved out.
[15] The band also contributed a new song, "Crescent", to Dear New Orleans, a 2010 benefit album released to raise funds and mark the fifth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
In late November 2015, the band released an alternate version of a song from the album, "Three Types of Reading Ambiguity", which was made available to premium subscribers of Esopus Magazine.
[1] In October 2023, Bissell announced that tracks he had initially composed for The Wrens' fourth album would be released in early 2024 under the name Car Colors via Absolutely Kosher Records.