Episode Details

Tim Quirk in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://wonderlick1.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Wonderlick/

Wonderlick is a Los Angeles–based indie rock band established in 2001 by Too Much Joy members Tim Quirk and Jay Blumenfield.

Quirk and Blumenfield originally formed the band in December 2000 to record free music for a website, entitled "Susquehanna Hat Company", which they had set up to sell Too Much Joy merchandise.

Jay Blumenfield's mother died two days before he got on a plane to Virginia to record this Wonderlick album. He went anyway. He and Tim Quirk — the two halves of Wonderlick, a band that's been making records since 2001 — had spent months planning this trip. Inspired by two wildly successful (artistically AND economically) house show tours and binge-watching Les Blank documentaries, they wanted their next LP to capture the sense of immediacy and abandon those acoustic house shows had fostered.

So they hired a mobile recording engineer and fiddler named Mike Mitchell in Floyd, Virginia, a tiny Appalachian town where every other citizen just so happens to be a virtuoso player of old-time music. Their original plan had been to arrive on a Friday night, when the Floyd Country Store hosts weekly jamborees, and hire some of the musicians they heard to record Wonderlick’s latest batch of songs in a cabin in the woods.

But Mike assembled a stellar crew of locals before they even arrived: banjo players, an upright bassist, a drummer, a clog dancer. He'd also secured a meditation center called the Shanti for the recording — a gorgeous open space with a wood-burning stove that, the band couldn't help noticing, felt a lot like the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. They'd spent a week Googling