Ambulance LTD has undergone some reconstructive surgery. After last spring’s New English EP, vocalist/guitarist Marcus Congleton left his bandmates and New York for Los Angeles, tapping John Cale to produce the new Ambulance record, due in March. So how did Congleton hook up with Cale, and what happened to the other guys in the band?
Last winter, somebody gave me one of Cale’s first solo records, (1970’s) Vintage Violence. I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve heard in a really long time. So I thought it’d be worth a shot to send him some demos and see if he’d be interested. Months and months later, after I kinda forgot about it, I came out to L.A. and ended up meeting with him. I lucked out, I guess. Then we got together in the studio and made a song from scratch; we pretty much wrote it on the spot. We thought, based on that, we’d be able to do a whole record together. A lot of these songs are ones that I started playing with the band, but those members started their own group (the Red Romance). They said they would be OK with me continuing to use the name because I wrote most of the songs and have been doing the band the longest.