Dennis Brennan

Prior to assembling his own ensemble during the opening years of the 1990s, roots-rock singer/songwriter Dennis Brennan performed across a string of successive Boston-area groups. After finishing high school, the musician who had spent his childhood in rural Berlin, Massachusetts, began appearing first in Worcester-area venues and subsequently in Boston clubs. Across more than twenty years he contributed to various Boston outfits, among them the Martells, whose 1980 single reached number one on local rock radio; toward the close of that decade his own project Push Push came close to securing multiple major-label contracts. A major label recruited the Rhode Island act Young Neal and the Vipers in 1990 and urged the group to replace its frontman with Brennan, yet the arrangement proved short-lived. When further near-misses at recording agreements collapsed, Brennan stepped away from performance and composition to serve as a warehouse foreman. Within months he discovered an accelerating output of new material, much of it centered on personal setbacks and struggles, portions of which appeared on his 1995 Rounder debut Jack in the Pulpit, supported by guitarist Duke Levine and drummer Billy Conway of Morphine. Iodine in the Wine arrived the following year, and Rule No. 1 marked his return in early 2000.