Heidi Lynne Gluck’s debut belongs in your rotation

“I feel like I’m kind of a boring interview,” Heidi Lynne Gluck tells me with a short laugh. She’s sitting across from me, in a comfortable-looking armchair in the living room of her Lawrence home. The fading sunlight illuminates her face as she reaches for her beer.

She’s not really the self-deprecating type. Her comment seems driven more by a sharp-eyed self-awareness. Gluck is 35 and not interested in playing the ingenue — something she makes abundantly clear on The Only Girl in the Room, her first EP. She has a 9-year-old kid — a cutie named Ollie, who’s at his grandmother’s this evening — and works a handful of jobs. In conversation and on record, she conveys a hard-earned wisdom set against unrelenting self-consciousness.

The five songs on The Only Girl in the Room, released in April on Lawrence’s Lotuspool Records — neatly convey their author. On the title track, Gluck details her experiences of being all alone and with everyone, the woman who is just one of the boys who the boys want to use. Her languid delivery over an uplifting, jangly piano melody implies that the isolation is at least partly her own idea.

That song recalls a different era of Gluck’s life. Before motherhood, before her marriage and divorce, before she was a solo artist, Gluck was part of the Indianapolis music scene. She moved there in 2000 from Grand Forks, North Dakota — where she had attended college — and formed a band, the Pieces, with Vess Ruhtenberg, who later played bass with the Lemonheads.

“I was just living the artist’s life,” Gluck says. “We would go to the studio — the guys in the band owned one that was all analog, with tons of vintage gear — and they just kind of schooled me, and we just messed around. I was just a dumb kid.”

She laughs drily as she recalls her 21-year-old self, hanging out in studios and rambling through tours. For a time, Gluck was also part of Juliana Hatfield’s early aughts band Some Girls.

“Now that I think about it, we just spent so much time playing,” she says. “I don’t have the luxury of doing that anymore.”

In 2005, a pregnant Gluck — who was born and raised in Manitoba, Canada — moved to Winnipeg with her then-fiancé, KC rocker Josh Berwanger (the Anniversary, Josh Berwanger Band). In 2006, shortly after becoming parents, the two relocated once more.

“We moved back here on the condition that we lived in Lawrence,” Gluck says. “Josh’s family is from Leawood, and I knew that I could feel at home here as a musician. I needed a place that was easy to be a mom and to be creative.”

But creativity didn’t come easily, at least not at first. In addition to new motherhood, Gluck worked a full-time job for several years, until 2010.

“There was a lot of change around that period,” Gluck says. “I got laid off, got divorced, broke my leg — I was basically crippled for nine months. But it was actually kind of a reset on my life. Things started happening again.”

In 2011, after her leg had properly healed, Gluck began picking up regular gigs as a session musician at studios in Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana. This included a spot working on an album by Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, 2012’s Rot Gut, Domestic. It was during that weeklong session that Gluck met singer-songwriter Kenny Childers.

“Kenny and I struck a songwriting relationship after that,” Gluck says. “I just sort of blossomed again. Even though I went back to Lawrence, we spent hours writing together on the Internet, sharing lyrics and trading ideas. I think we have 50 or 60 songs now that we just haven’t gotten out, partly because we don’t live in the same city and partly because we don’t have the money.”

The Only Girl in the Room is a sliver of the mass of songs that Gluck has accumulated. It was recorded in this living room, which is also where Gluck holds practices with her full band. She gestures around to the three guitars, various amps and an upright piano, and mentions that she had plenty of borrowed gear and help on the album, too.

Though the process sounds fairly DIY, the EP itself is a model of cohesion, with each song a different shade of folk pop and the whole thing filled with polished hooks and subtle twang. The production is just spare enough to let Gluck’s voice and sharp lyrics really shine. She has a Jenny Lewis-like talent for wry observations and clever metaphors, and they unfold in striking verses, as on the chilling, vulnerable “Target Practice.”

The Only Girl in the Room is one of this year’s finest local releases so far, a deeply honest, understated debut. Its only disappointment is its brevity, though if her plans hold together, a remedy is on the way. Girl is, she says, the first of a four-part series; the second EP should arrive late this summer or early in the fall.

“It’s been hard for me the last 10 years, having songs and knowing that I want to do something with them and not being able to do it, or even finish,” Gluck says. “It’s not even since I’ve been a mom. I’ve always been like that. I’ve been in other bands, and someone else was always driving the project. It was an incredible process for me to finish and not depend on somebody else, especially some guy who thinks he knows how to turn the knob better than you do.”

Gluck smiles. For all of that, she says, there have been no missed steps in her music career.

“Don’t get me wrong — it just gets harder to block time away to do music in between mom-ing and day jobs and other people’s music,” she says. “It’s been hard. And it’s hard to just keep it going. But obviously, the quality of your craft improves as you age. And this EP, you know, it might not be a high-quality recording, but I got what I wanted out of it.”