Singled Out: Wonderly's Plaid Pantry

Portland, OR duo Wonderly (Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk) just released their new album "Wolves" and to celebrate we asked Jim to tell us about the single "Plaid Pantry". Here is the story:

This song wasn't so much written (the way we usually dive into composing songs) - it erupted. It was an extended laugh that we lassoed into something else...."Plaid Pantry" is the local convenience store chain in Oregon. As weird as Portland professes to be, you haven't lived in Portland until you've been in a Plaid Pantry at 3am. It's a great show, even better if you're actually part of the weirdness. In our more reckless days, we probably wasted much of the time of many Plaid Pantry clerks. They have a TOUGH job. We were playing around on upright and guitar one day and we started feeling empathy about these clerks and the sh*t they must go through with the late night pack of wolves, and it occurred to us that they, too, are members of Portland's weird elite.

We imagined one of the clerks wrestling with daily struggles like hospital bills, and our protagonist started plotting an overthrow. Then, like our song "November 1971" the thing became a short film even before it was finished as a song. We had no trouble getting a hold of the CEO of the Plaid Pantry, who had no trouble telling us that we could absolutely NOT film this thing in his stores. Fortunately, one of the coolest cats in the world, Toody Cole (Dead Moon, Portland's coolest band) just happens to own a bodega in outlying Clackamas, and she said it would be cool if we filmed there.

Things got weird when filming, because we didn't want Toody's store to close its doors / lose business. My daughters play the underage drinkers/smokers, and one particular afternoon drunkard came in, bought a couple 40 ouncers, and proceeded to lecture us about what terrible people we were to depict kids smoking (the video is a work of FICTION, people) - this angry drunk Karen dude actually stopped us from filming for a time until we pretended to send the kids home. We continued with our fiction and the extremely talented Liz Ghiz played both "wolves" (which one do you feed the Abba Zabba bar?), and our buddy Tom Grissom filmed some of the tricky parts. Anyway, people need to be nicer to their clerks. And sometimes vice versa. Just nicer please.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here

Wonderly Release 'Wolves' Album

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