Aside from his groundbreaking work as the frontman for post-punk art-rock titans Shudder To Think, Craig Wedren is a busy movie and TV composer. He’s the guy behind the music in the acclaimed series Yellowjackets and countless other projects. For his latest endeavor, Wedren is returning to the fairly recent past with an expanded version of 2024’s The Dream Dreaming, his first release following a 2018 heart attack. Available April 10 via his Tough Lover imprint, the deluxe edition supplements the original 11-song solo album with five unreleased tracks and a five-song acoustic EP recorded live with a string quintet at the famed Henson (now Chaplin) Recording Studios in Los Angeles.
This version of “Play Innocent” was taken from those sessions. The song was originally written for Wet Hot American Summer, the satirical, nostalgia-driven 2015 prequel series that bests the 2001 cult film of the same name.
Here’s more from Wedren on the track:
“It was one of about 30 songs I and my mighty team created for the show, each an homage to a different artist, song or genre we loved from the era—circa 1981, when the show takes place. The original version was inspired by Dire Straits, thus the relatively low vocal register and ‘Skateaway’-adjacent beat.
“The song stuck with me after the show was on the air—and by the time I got into The Dream Dreaming, it had evolved from a demo-type idea into a whole new gleaming thing, with contributions from Mike Farrell and Jherek Bischoff—who’d worked on the original—still firmly intact. Add Paul Cartwright’s swooping, ever-elegant strings to the mix, and the cumulative effect was what I’d originally , if unconsciously, hoped for: a triptych riot of memories clicking from teenage summer-camp trysts through East Village misadventures in my 20s, all glimpsed through the prism of a candlelit ayahuasca gathering as a middle-aged adult.
“When my pal Joe Wong invited me to do a stripped-down club show—acoustic with string quintet—it revealed the beauty of Paul’s string arrangements and brought out something delicate and a little achy in the songs themselves, so we decided to record and film the set live. Henson Recording Studios was our number-one choice—so much magic and beauty there, from its founding by Charlie Chaplin in the 1918 to Jim Henson taking it over and making it Muppet HQ, Hollywood. And, of course, ‘We Are The World’ was recorded there; watch the documentary, if you haven’t already. A hallowed, haunted art factory, anointed and energized by great, mischievous ghosts and their creations … just the spot. Sometimes, in the midst of an adventure, we make like nothing questionable, potentially dangerous or untoward is happening—whistling past the graveyard, as it were. Pretending a little. Playing innocent. This is that.”
We’re proud to premiere Craig Wedren’s “Play Innocent (Live At Henson Studios).”
—Hobart Rowland
