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Nov 17, 2023 By Mark Redfern

Car Colors is the new project from Charles Bissell, formerly of The Wrens. This week he shared its first single “Old Death,” along with two B-sides, “And It’s All Guns and Arrows (alt. take)” and “I’ll Bear.” The debut Car Colors album is due out early next year via Absolutely Kosher (details are TBA).

The Wrens imploded after it took the band many, many years to follow-up the band’s beloved 2003 album, The Meadowlands. The Wrens’ Kevin Whelan went on to form a new project, Aeon Station, releasing its debut album, Observatory, on Sub Pop in 2021. It featured some songs originally intended for the follow-up to The Meadowlands.

Bissell had this to say about the new single in a press release: “‘Old Death’ is, like the rest of the album, sort of a sequel to The Meadowlands before it and like that one, is about time, how one chooses to spend it, what those choices cost. That means for me, the song (and album) is also about making the album itself. It’s about death, maybe obviously, but it’s really about my dumb life. And because so much of that life lined up weirdly well to The Odyssey, it’s all sorta hung on Homer’s narrative framework (while I unlike say, Ulysses, in my case it’s all very non-fictional/auto-biographical). However like Ulysses, every song is written in a stream-of-consciousness mode. Or for me, really more of a stream-of-memories: that time this happened, that other-time-this-reminds-me-of happened etc. Hence, the parenthetical dating throughout the lyrics as those memories pop in and out. So basically like, unlike, like and then unlike Ulysses - ha.”

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