Walking into the living room of Kevin Whelan’s suburban home in Teaneck, New Jersey, in late September of last year, there is no sign of his life as a recording artist: no memorabilia lining the walls, no lyric books strewn about. It’s decorated like a typical suburban abode-- with as much edge as a Pottery Barn catalog.

The only hint of his double life comes as we ascend the stairs to the second floor, where a large bundle of wires can be seen snaking their way down to the living room area, around the kitchen refrigerator, and through the door that leads to the basement. These wires connect their basement recording studio to the upstairs control room (a repurposed bedroom), where the Wrens have all convened for the first time in several weeks to do some live tracking for the record they have been working on for, well, a very, very long time.

Having all four Wrens together at Whelan’s house is a rare event nowadays. MacDonald is seemingly the most difficult to corral given his two-hour-plus drive door-to-door. (He also has family obligations on top of his demanding day job, which makes Wrens time harder to carve out than ever.) So today, the Wrens are prioritizing drum parts.

For the first half hour or so, it’s mostly Bissell at the computer, futzing around with files, presumably figuring out what he wants to work on and drop in where. Then MacDonald is sent down to the basement. Bissell pumps the pre-recorded track into MacDonald’s headphones and encourages him to improvise, using his cell phone as a walkie talkie. They do a number of sequential takes, with MacDonald making his way back up at 15-minute intervals to review the playbacks with the rest of the band.

Spend any time at all with the Wrens while they record and it quickly becomes apparent that there is nothing even remotely normal about their process. For starters, very few bands of their stature record entirely in their own home, and fewer still have one member reviewing clinical trial clearance paperwork between takes. In addition, although they are working steadily throughout their four hours together, the yield is shockingly minimal. At the end of the day’s session, they have, maybe, two minutes worth of drums. This is the kind of band that says, “let’s try one more thing” ten times in a row.

One might expect heated arguments to erupt or tempers to flare in this molasses-slow environment, but there is never a cross word over the four hours. The truth is the Wrens-- the band originally born of necessity-- are now friends, first and foremost, and the music, at times, almost seems like an excuse to hang out and enjoy each other’s company as opposed to the reason they come together.

Which is not to say that they don’t care about the music. They do. But they care in a way that's fundamentally different than the Wrens of two decades ago, or even of other bands looking to their art for sustenance. If being in a “normal” band is like a marriage, one might say the Wrens are like the divorced couple who remain lifelong friends.

Sciara believes that the unique dynamic at play during the recording process can be chalked up to the dramatically lowered stakes, which began circa The Meadowlands and continue to this day. “Disagreements [should] come up, like, ‘No, no, no, it’s got to sound like this,’ but it never happens with these guys. It’s almost like the Stepford band-- they just get along. But if they had to do it in the way that most bands had to do it, it would be different. It just doesn’t impact their lives that much, it's just for fun.” Indeed, when I ask the three members of the band who work day jobs if they would even want to quit if they were able to do the Wrens full-time and maintain their current lifestyles, none seem to have much interest.

Back to the subject of this long-gestating album: It does indeed exist, though in exactly what form is up for debate. A year ago, the Wrens played back two songs to feature on the album, one titled “Leaves” and another with the working title “The Whole Thing, the Whole Thing, the Whole Thing”, and insisted that they only had a couple of parts left to record for the album prior to mixing. Twelve months later, they’re just about to start mixing; once you understand how the Wrens function, you know that hearing an album is 90% done gives no meaningful indication of how long the remaining 10% will take to complete.

So while it still may be hard to say exactly when the album will see the light of day, all four Wrens insist that it will be released. For now, they are simply grateful to be in the spot they’re in after all these years-- to be living proof that there’s more than one way to “make it.” Says Greg Whelan: “A lot of people our age come to shows and bring their kids. They relate to us because they used to be in bands but then they quit. We're like their weird hero in that respect, which is flattering. We're really proud of that.”