On Glad Pulses's Blue and Bright, veteran Baltimore-area songwriters find a new and unpredictable sound in collaboration.

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Glad Pulses didn't really set out to be a band.

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Singers and guitarists Eben Dennis and Lawrence Lanahan had shared a bill in 2019 with their bands Soft Peaks and Disappearing Ink. In 2023, Eben and Lawrence reconnected when their kids ended up on the same soccer team. (You say "dad rock," we say "father-songwriter.")

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Eben sat in with Lawrence and Adam Koontz in Disappearing Ink that summer, and when the band's bass player left, Eben, Lawrence, and Adam got together occasionally to run through treasured covers and songs from Eben's and Lawrence's back catalog.

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To fill out the bass chair, Lawrence called Chuck Rainville, an old friend who'd recorded and performed with The Jennifers. The quartet gelled around the old material in occasional gatherings at Lanahan's house in northeast Baltimore, and they began playing casual gigs at a bar down the street and the neighborhood farmers market. (The band didn't even have a name for their first performance.)

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New songs quickly piled up as everyone wrote toward the band's emerging sound. They began recording in Lawrence's basement studio. In 10 months, they tracked 13 songs.

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The result is Blue and Bright.

 

Sonically, the band followed the songs where they led, and the material is stylistically promiscuous. The detailed arrangements incorporate vintage keyboard sounds, intricate backing vocals, and lots of guitar jangle. (For professional development, the band went to two shows together last year: Teenage Fanclub and Robyn Hitchcock.) Two live-tracked songs generated mesmerizing jams at the end, which remain on the record.

 

The lyrics, at turns tender and droll, are heavy on storytelling and setting. All good songs need proper nouns, and these will take you to Rappahannock, The Liberty Inn, Baltimore (more than once), Moe's, and a Ponderosa steakhouse in 1991. Characters shoot free throws, embarrass themselves at weddings, meditate on the smell of a dryer vent, obsess over fantasy novels, feebly resist temptation (romance and substances), score schwag, go fanboy on favorite songwriters, and talk a little shit.

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​For booking and interviews, please call 410-375-6350 or write to llanahan@gmail.com.