The Wrens Frontman Charles Bissell Reveals He’s Fighting Cancer

Charles Bissell of New Jersey indie outfit the Wrens has revealed he's currently receiving treatment for multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that attacks plasma cells in bone marrow.

In a Facebook post, the singer-guitarist said he was diagnosed at the end of last year after he received treatment for pneumonia. Bissell is taking drugs as part of a clinical trial and pointed out that while multiple myeloma isn't fully curable, his "prognosis is almost certainly not as dire as googling might make it seem."

He also said, "the drugs that have come out in the last year or so are getting pretty spectacular, so there's a lot of optimism that that yo-yo cycle is flattening out and they're even talking cure stuff. And they don't mean 'Friday, I'm in Love.'" Read his full statement here.

The Wrens have been working on the follow-up to 2005's The Meadowlands, but Bissell said his health has lessened the importance of the album, at least temporarily. "The whole thing has definitely re-shuffled my priority deck," he said. "And for a record that's largely about time, how one spends what time one has, how I specifically cooked through a half-decade-plus ironically making an album about allotting one's time at the sacrifice of... well, actually living it, I'm at this point even less inclined to hop in a tour van on the multi-week plan."

But that doesn't mean his attitude might change. He said you might also find him in 2017 "booked solo in every Long John Silver's on the tri-state circuit, an accordion on-strap & in pirate costume, singing for $10,000 pills one jig and reel at a time."