Goodnight Blue Moon’s New Album Sees The Light

“Undertow,” the first single from Goodnight Blue Moon​’s new album Dawning Dream, announces the evolution of the band’s sound right from the start. A hi-hat hisses for the drums to settle into the kind of rhythm Al Green might like. The bass throbs. ​“It’s been a long time coming / I’ve been working overtime,” the vocals croon. ​“The days keep passing by / See fireworks light the sky, so bright.” A violin lays down a runway for a lead guitar to take off with a sparse melody, while another rhythm guitar adds in the planks from an old Motown record.

The elements that made the New Haven-based Goodnight Blue Moon’s previous albums, 2012’s How Long and 2014’s A Girl I Never Met, successes — the thoughtful and catchy songwriting, the rich harmonies and shifting textures a band can pull off when it’s composed of seven people, many of whom are singers and multi-instrumentalists — are all on display. But ​“Undertow” also has an easy, carefree R&B vibe to it that feels new to the band. It sounds effortless.

Which is ironic, because Dawning Dream is the product of two years, a few bass players, and a series of scheduling snarls as the band — Erik Elligers, Mathew Crowley, Nancy Matlack, Nick D’Errico, Sean Rubin, Dan Liparini, and Victoria Wepler — juggled jobs, kids, and calendars all to get the music just right. Ready at last to release the album at a show at Lyric Hall on April 27, Elligers and Matlock laughed at the comedy of errors, and the bottles of wine, that got them to this upcoming Friday night.

The band tried to start recording Dawning Dream in 2015, ​“but it just wasn’t feeling right,” Elligers said. Matlack agreed. ​“We were coming off of not really playing together much.”

Then at the end of 2015, Wepler had a baby. Original bass player Carl Testa welcomed a son into his family, and gracefully bowed out. The band found a new bass player, only to lose him to a move. Again and again. ​“Our bass players kept moving!” Elligers said — to New York, to New Orleans. ​“We had two or three other people as well, who were just like Band-Aids.”

At last, in 2016, Elligers met bassist Sean Rubin in Hartford. He had just graduated from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford and his ongoing music project, Lady Hips, had just broken up. ​“He was a teacher like the rest of us,” Elligers said. And he was looking to get involved in a steady band.

In summer 2016 the band headed into the studio at Gold Coast Recorders in Bridgeport with producer Tim Walsh. ​“We did all the basics at Gold Coast in just a couple days,” Elligers said. But there was still work to do. And that was when the scheduling nightmares began.

“Just to get four of us in the room at the same time was like a jigsaw puzzle,” Matlack said.

“There was one time we decided to scrap a song. We would re-record it at Sean’s house. We planned the whole thing out. We were psyched,” Elligers said. ​“And then Vicki was like, ​‘oh shoot, I can’t even record that day.’”

The next available day for all of the band members was two months later — and it wasn’t even really available. The entire band played hooky from their jobs to make it happen. ​“Erik and I both had food poisoning that day,” Matlack said.

At last, the band had the basic tracks it wanted for the album and were down to recording overdubs of instruments and vocal passes. They scheduled more dates. ​“But even so, we’d do one song in an evening,” Matlack said.

By the end of summer 2017, Elligers said, the album was ​“95 percent done.”

Then came mixing.

“We started mixing in July,” Matlack said with a laugh. ​“Somehow that ended up taking six months.”

“I think we finished it early December,” Elligers said. ​“We were all kind of involved” — the band members and Walsh, who served as the band’s fresh ears.

“There was a lot of back and forth to figure out what everyone was bringing to the table,” Matlack said.

And it mattered that the band was making an album that really did sound different from the previous one. ​“We tried a lot more things,” Elligers said. ​“We had a lot of keys, a ton of guitar. It was a whole new thing for us, figuring out how it could work with all this lush orchestration that we had already created. We wanted to be hands-on, and we had a lot of sessions where we created things in the studio.”

One song, ​“Pushback,” happened very quickly. It took ​“one night and four bottles of wine,” Matlack said. ​“Erik had pretty much come up it with in one night. The next day, Sean and Vicki and Erik and I just sat down and wrote it together. It felt so right, and the song itself is kind of poignant even for us.”

But other songs, like ​“Rabbit Hole,” had ​“several iterations to get to where they were,” she continued.

“Rabbit Hole was written in 2015 and we first thought, ​‘this is so simple, it’s done,’” Elligers said. ​“And then it wasn’t done.” Verses, choruses, and bridges were added. Others were dropped. ​“Finally, it was just sheer muscle,” Elligers said. ​“Nick said, ​‘it just needs a bridge.’ And I knuckled down and wrote a bridge.”

“To this day when someone says something is a verse or a chorus” in that song, Matlack said, laughing again, ​“I’m not sure what they mean.”

Along the way, the band members figured out how their sound was evolving — and, likely, how it will continue to.

“We focus on such thick vocals and orchestration, and we have a hard time letting go when a song just needs to breathe,” Matlack said. But in time, that’s what they did. One song, ​“Waiting,” ​“just came together when we stripped it down to nothing and let it breathe.”

Elligers agreed. ​“It forced us into a place that was uncomfortable, and we just had to sit with it and ask, ​‘what does it need?’”

“But that’s the whole vibe of the band. We just made it work,” he added.

Elligers and Matlack both can laugh a lot about it now because they are thrilled with the results, and eager to share the new songs with a live audience at the band’s release party. ​“At this point we just want the music to speak for itself,” Elligers said.

Matlack agreed. ​“It’s going to be fun to see how they translate outside of our rehearsal space,” she said.

And possibly, Elligers joked, ​“the next record is going to be live.”

Goodnight Blue Moon celebrates the release of Dawning Dream on Friday, April 27, 8 p.m. at Lyric Hall, 827 Whalley Ave. Click here for tickets and more information.