Exclusive: Listen to the premiere of Heidi Lynne Gluck’s Too Much Rock single

If you’ve heard Heidi Lynne Gluck’s two recordings for Lawrence’s Lotuspool Records — the 2015 EP The Only Girl in the Room and 2016’s Pony Show LP — you might be surprised by the tracks she’s contributed to the Too Much Rock single series, which we’re debuting here today. Those albums hewed toward multi-layered indie pop. These two new songs are just Gluck, her guitar, and a piano, recorded in her living room.

Each installment of TMR’s single series has the same format: an original song on the A-side, and a cover on the flip side. Gluck’s A-side, “Party Line,” is a deeply personal story of sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher, and it’ll shatter you: My teacher took me in his arms/ My teacher understood/ But he took his hands much farther/ Than any teacher should, Gluck sings. Listen below. 

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The B-side is a cover of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” from the band’s self-titled 1986 album. It twists the original’s accordion-driven, zydeco-meets-reggae lope into a funeral march, replete with uncomfortable samples sourced by Paul Mahern, the engineer who mixes all of Gluck’s projects. 

“To be honest, I don’t really get Heidi,” says Too Much Rock’s Sid Sowder, by way of explaining his interest in Gluck for the series. “She does everything. And does everything so well. But I don’t know where her head is at all the time.”

Sowder cites “Better Homes & Gardens,” from Pony Show. “There’s a simple charm to it musically, but the lyrics are anything but,” he says. 

Sowder says that track reminded him of “Good Guys & Bad Guys” in that way. “That song that has a bounce, it has all these layers, everyone sounds like they’re having fun, but there’s something else going on,” he says. “What is it? She dove directly into that something else that the original version of the song had, and built her track around its subtext.”

I caught up with Gluck one Friday morning at Lawrence’s Bourgeois Pig to talk a bit about the single. 

The Pitch: How old is “Party Line,” as a song? The subject matter seems like it’s been around for a while.

Heidi Lynne Gluck: I don’t know where it came from. It’s one of those songs that just came out of nowhere. I didn’t plan to write it. It’s two or three years old? I think I was having fun with my new guitar — that Gretsch — and a delay pedal, so that’s where the guitar line came from. The last album came out in August of ’16, so it was probably around that time when I wrote it. No, wait, let me think. Yeah, I recorded that one as everything was getting finished up for the album, and we decided to keep it off the album, just because it felt really separate from everything else.

I can hear that, both in terms of tone and subject matter. Sometimes, songs that are put out as singles seem like they’re just leftovers. But “Party Line” is one of those songs that works better when you interact with it on its own.

Yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing an album of that [laughs]. There’s no reason to. It was just, like, a quick journal entry or something. Both of those songs feel that way — like there’s some type of turmoil that I just needed to get out of me. I felt like it didn’t belong on the next collection. It just felt like a standalone. It doesn’t feel like an A-side to me, so it’s kind of weird that it’s the A-side.

Were you previously familiar with the cover that Sid picked for the B-side?

Not at all, and I was kind of amused by it when I listened to it. I love the challenge of a cover song. I love to just take something and do what I want with it. I tried to keep the spirit of the song, but it turned out awful and hokey, and then I just started to hate the song [laughs].

I even asked Sid, “How sure are you about this song?” He was pretty sure about it, but he gave me an out: “If you don’t want to do this, it’s totally fine.” Then I kept playing around with it. I was just like, “I’m going to go as far as I can go with this, without direction, and see what [Sid] says.”

I didn’t want to do it the fun accordion way. I consulted some friends, and they were all, “Fuck the song up!” So, that’s what we did. I just felt like, “Let’s make this song what the climate feels like now,” and it feels like despair and hopelessness. Or, it did at that point. When I listen to the single now, I’m like, “Wow. Where was I?”

The Lawrence release party for the “Party Line” single is at the White Schoolhouse on Thursday, August 9, with Jess Williamson and CS Luxem. Details on that show here.