Welcome To The Welcome Wagon

I cannot emphasize enough the coolness of this album.

Here is a good sample: "I Am a Stranger."

From Asthmatic Kitty Records:

The Welcome Wagon began as husband and wife singing in the privacy of their home. Having little to no previous musical experience or training, Vito purchased a guitar with the desire to sing hymns with his family. With Monique accompanying on toy glockenspiel or harmonica, the two would amble through old hymnals, psalters and prayerbooks. Their inability to read music was no big issue; Vito simply made up new tunes to old words.

While their most familiar venue was (and is) their living room, the Welcome Wagon have been periodically coaxed to small stages at bars, parties, and seminaries throughout the New York City area, often joined by friends on upright bass, drums, piano, and banjo. These intimate arrangements preserve the delicate nature of the Welcome Wagon's identity.

But there is another Welcome Wagon, the one that can be heard on their debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon. This version of the band retains the heart and soul of pastor and his wife singing together, but dresses them up in the transcendent musical vestments of Sufjan Stevens, who produced and helped arrange the record.

The collaboration between Stevens and The Welcome Wagon began in 2001 with their appearance on the Asthmatic Kitty compilation To Spirit Back the Mews (2001), debuting the first song they ever wrote and recorded, "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood." Since that time they have been patiently recording an album of hymns, pop covers, and folksy originals with their friend and Brooklyn neighbor. But it was the nativity of that first song which established their pattern of work together: husband and wife write and arrange songs with the architecture of a country chapel, while Stevens (as latter-day Christopher Wren) designs and attaches flying buttresses, soaring spires and reliquaries, gargoyles, gryphons and cherubs dotting the façade. Somehow this unlikely partnership has produced a sublime addition to that genre called "church music".

Admittedly, for a gospel duo, there's far less soul than sweet sincerity in the casual songs of the Welcome Wagon. Vito and his wife are unabashedly Midwestern, ordinary and uncool. But this is precisely what sets them apart from the standard fare of contemporary liturgical music. It doesn't feign emotion; it doesn't pander to stylistic pretensions; it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: the result of countless, informal social exchanges between friends. A home-cooked meal followed by a few microphones taped to folding chairs. A family gathering, a summary of happy noises, and a room crowded with familiar faces. Sure, there are showy guitar riffs and piano codas and harmonica solos, a rowdy chorus, an imposing flourish of brass instruments like wartime canons. But at the heart of it—if you really listen carefully—there's just a pastor and his wife tentatively singing in the quiet privacy of their own home.