The uncanny fervency of Old Time music was the starting point for the Wingdale Community Singers. A copy of Black Hole Heaven, Hannah Marcus’s album on Bar/None Records, bestowed on novelist Rick Moody by Bar/None’s proprietor, Glenn Morrow, led Moody to Marcus and a long friendship followed. The two shared interest in old folk, blues, and bluegrass, and after a time the two attempted writing some songs in that idiom. The form was old, but the lyrics were contemporary and urban, reflecting that other New York City, the borough of Brooklyn, where both lived. With a brace of songs, Marcus and Moody solicited the aid and counsel of David Grubbs, a veteran of twenty years of punk and experimental music, and a former member of Squirrel Bait, Gastr del Sol, Bastro, The Red Krayola, and many other projects. Grubbs brought a modernist sensibility and a rich facility with country music (from his roots in Louisville) to the lineup. The three recorded their eponymously titled first album in 2004 and it was released the following year on Plain Recordings.
Because of Grubbs’s demanding schedule as a solo performer and as a full-time instructor in music at Brooklyn College, The Wingdales often solicited and found other partners for live performances, including Abe Streep, on violin and mandolin, and in the course of playing gigs in 2006, they enlisted Nina Katchadourian, who in the long Wingdale tradition of doing many other things, is well known as a visual and conceptual artist. She also curates at the Drawing Center in New York City. To the Wingdales, Katchadourian brought a lifetime of songwriting, and a rich alto voice, low enough to swap the tenor line with Moody on occasion, making The Wingdale Community Singers a genuine vehicle for three-part and even, on occasion, four-part harmonies.
In 2007, The Wingdale Community Singers, when schedules permitted, began recording their follow-up album at Seaside Recording Lounge in South Park Slope, home to a number of New Pornographer sessions recently, with Patrick McCarthy engineering. By fall of 2008, they’d mixed and mastered Spirit Duplicator, fifteen new songs (including one old gem by the Carter Family), four by Marcus, three by Moody, two by Katchadourian, and five by Marcus and Moody, exhibiting, as the title of the album would suggest, a continuity with the old folk and bluegrass forms that colored the first Wingdales release, but also moving in new directions, as in the dark rock and roll inflected opening track, “(I’m in the Mood) to Drive,” the gospel of “AWOL,” the baroque chamber pop of “Montreal,” “Let My Ship Pass By,” and “Aviary,” and traditional feel of the Carter Family’s “Death Is Only A Dream” and Moody’s “On the Carousel,” an a cappella update of the Sacred Harp songwriting style. The album augments the four core members of the band, who all play guitar, keyboards, and sing, with longtime Wingdale alumnus Abe Street (violin, mandolin), and other players from Booklyn, like Tianna Kennedy (cello), Gerald Menke (pedal steel, slide), Taylor Bergren-Chrisman (bass), Charles Burst (drums), and Nadje Noordhuis (trumpet).
The Wingdale Community Singers have tried, in their brief history, to make music that has the old community feel of folk music, and the reliability of these old styles, as well as the complexity and lyrical dynamism of contemporary modern music. On Spirit Duplicator, they both reveal a continuity with the music they love, as they also try to move the idiom a little further. It’s an album of deep feeling, great harmonies, and great songwriting, that could have been made almost anytime in the last fifty years by people sitting in a room playing together. And, in fact, much of it was made this way, a group of people well past the youth that drives much popular music, all of them with busy complicated lives, sitting in a room, playing and singing for the love of doing it.