The Wrens’ Charles Bissell Fighting Cancer

Charles Bissell of the Wrens has revealed that he’s currently receiving treatment for multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that attacks plasma cells in bone marrow. In a Facebook post, he said he was diagnosed at the end of last year, after receiving treatment for pneumonia. Currently, he’s taking drugs as part of a clinical trial to combat the illness. Bissell noted that while multiple myeloma isn’t fully curable, he also said “my prognosis is almost certainly not as dire as googling might make it seem.” He added, “The drugs that have come out in the last year or so are getting pretty spectacular so there’s a lot of optimism that that yo-yo cycle is flattening out and they’re even talking cure stuff. And they don’t mean Friday, I’m in Love.” Read the full note here or below.

The Wrens have long been at work on the follow-up to 2005′s The Meadowlands. At the end of 2014, the band said the record was finished; in the middle of 2015, they said it was being mastered. (Last year, they also released a cassette of three songs.) The note concludes with somewhat of an update on the new album, which Bissell pointed out “is of no real importance.” Here’s what he said:

… although I don’t know to what extent things will be different with this next record because of all this (i.e. mostly touring stuff, I guess) the whole thing has definitely re-shuffled my priority deck. And for a record that’s largely about time, how one spend’s what time one has, how I specifically cooked through a half-decade-plus ironically making an album about allotting one’s time at the sacrifice of…well, actually living it, I’m at this point even less inclined to hop in a tour van on the multi-week plan.

Of course I say that now. 2017 may also find me booked solo in every Long John Silver’s on the tri-state circuit, an accordion on-strap & in pirate costume, singing for $10,000 pills one jig and reel at a time.

Read “Not What They Had Planned“, our feature on the Wrens. 

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