Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Ann Arbor District Library’s Pulp blog and has been expanded for this publication.

Pat Deneau sings about the adrenaline rush he gets from work and music on the song “Hits the Same.”

The musician-firefighter’s heart pounds as he climbs on a firetruck with the Ann Arbor Fire Department, or sets foot onstage with The City Lines and sings, “I don’t know what I’m doing here / But my heart is racing / Is this the price to feel so alive?”

“When I’m singing those lines, I’m almost picturing like I’ve got the hose line in my arm, and I’ve got my buddy on my back pushing me in and the fire’s pouring overhead,” said Deneau about the anthemic opener from the Ann Arbor trio’s new album, Prescribed Fires. “It feels exactly the same as flipping the standby switch on the amp, and the volume control is up and the cymbals wash.”

“Hits the Same” also sets the compelling narrative for The City Lines’ third album, which explores parenthood, career, mental health, heritage, and the environment.

Through that narrative, the alt-rock band shares cathartic experiences that confront the past and promote future growth. Metaphorically, it’s akin to a prescribed fire, an environmental stewardship practice that relies on controlled flames to restore health to ecosystems.

“And so we’re writing honest music about what this is like,” said Bob Zammit, drummer for The City Lines. “I accept that some people are not going to connect to it because it’s theoretical for them—they’re not in that space. But my sincere hope is that for some people who are, there’s not 100 records released in Southeast Michigan that cover the same topics.”

Prescribed Fires examines those topics through existential lyrics, heartfelt vocals, and bold instrumentation.

“We’re talking about some heavy stuff here, but the production on the record is so upbeat,” Deneau said. “It sounds kind of late ‘90s, early 2000s rock, and I think that’s a cool juxtaposition. I think that worked out really well for this collection of songs.”

Deneau, Zammit, and Megan Marcoux (bass, flute, vocals) will soon share that new collection of songs during an October 24 album release show at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti.

I recently spoke to Deneau and Zammit about Prescribed Fires ahead of the band’s show.

Q: It’s been over two years since you released an album. How does it feel to have this one out? 

Pat Deneau (PD): It feels good to be done with the record now. We’re decompressing from that process. It’s so different than performing live, where you go on a stage and you start making sound. People start bobbing their heads and getting into it, but recording and releasing music doesn’t have that same feeling. It’s a totally separate aspect.

Bob Zammit (BZ): There’s sort of this temporal disorientation that happens because we worked on this record really hard for two years. If you don’t process these thoughts, it feels like it’s done. I think this is true for everyone. Putting a record out, you have to find new sources of energy because you use most of what came to you intrinsically in making it. The thrill of hearing these songs back has somewhat faded after recording the whole thing once in our basement during pre-production and then doing every step and every mix.

Q: The album reflects a variety of genres, ranging from emo and alt-rock to punk and indie rock. Why did you include all of those styles on Prescribed Fires? 

PD: This particular record is saying, “Let’s just try everything that feels good.” And Bob had told me something one of his instructors had said years ago: “If it sounds good, it is good.” Some of the harder stuff might sound more like Rise Against. I listen to that, and I love that kind of stuff. It’s very much a part of my youth, and my introduction to music was through that style of music.

That was really fun to do, yelling gang vocals. We were in the vocal room, almost just yelling, and it’s this communal [experience]—we’re just yelling into the void. We’re giggling and laughing, and that feels incredible to capture that. And then we were able to soften things a bit and make things a little bit more delicate. Some of the softer stuff that we were able to pull out matches some of the lyrical stories.

Q: How does the album take sonic inspiration from Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl? 

PD: Dizzy Up the Girl was the first record that we all agreed on and said, “This is what we’re all looking at,” and [co-producer] Brandon [Benson] as well. We modeled “The Bear” after [Goo Goo Dolls’] “Broadway,” and we modeled the guitar and some of the phrasing.

BZ: The punk-rock and skate-punk stuff is in our history and has been expressed before on songs like “Erased.” Some of this is beginning to average our styles a little more, but some of it is just mellowing. We’re still in there, but I’ll say with no irony that Goo Goo Dolls has been really significant. The ‘90s alt-rock—the karaoke jam—there’s so much there. And to be honest, Dizzy Up the Girl was a reference sonically. I still can’t think of songs that I like more than “Black Balloon.”

Q: How did co-producers Brandon Benson and Jon Graber help you shape the album’s sound? 

BZ: Brandon and Jon, our [Los Angeles] team, produced it. That’s another thing that evolved, and that partnership came together. We were working with Brandon, and he said, “I want you to extend the trust you have in me to my partner, [Jon].” We jokingly call this [album] our major label record, but it’s still self-released. We thought, “What if we let every song matter on its own? What if we let team L.A. take as long as they need to?”

And by the way, L.A. was on fire during this record, and it flooded, and there were protests. It has been a heck of a year for L.A., but the time and care that Brandon and Jon put into it really came through. I feel like production-wise, it’s the best of both in the sense that we got these really crisp, sharp, meticulous mixes from Los Angeles. Then our man David Roof warmed it up with some good old tube compressors and put the Michigan back in it.

Q: Resilience is another theme you explore on Prescribed Fires. What was it like to examine it while writing the songs for the album? 

BZ: Most of these songs were written in early to mid-2024, which was a different climate. To be honest, by the time we finished this album, one of the things we had to deal with was: Does it matter? It was a concern I had as we finished the record in a very charged and stressful time, and we’re talking about things that are somewhere in the middle. We aren’t exactly talking about survival. We’re talking about living better, not just living.

At first, my concern was, “Do we need to hold this?” We all just lived through a global pandemic, and now we’re living through difficult political times. The truth of [Maslow’s hierarchy of needs] is that if you are struggling to eat, there’s less time for heart, but it doesn’t mean that your heart doesn’t need it. It doesn’t mean that you don’t need to care about your mental health while you’re trying to feed your kids.

And so this stuff is meant to be long-term thinking. We don’t just want to survive the crisis of right now. Nor do we just want to survive the crisis from the last time or the next one we don’t know about yet. I’m not in any way trying to put these different priorities in some kind of a rank order. Life is clearly going to make us all worry about some really important stuff right now. Some really survival-level stuff, some of us more than others. Let’s not pretend that different populations aren’t targeted differently, and yet, we’re still all going to have to survive on the other side of it. Actually, there’s no better time than to say some of this stuff. We’re going to need to be as well as we can be. Our kids are going to need the best parents that we can be because the world is not getting any easier.

Q: “Do It All” examines the rewards and challenges that come with being a father, husband, and firefighter. How does this song serve as a tribute to work-life balance? 

PD: I love that one, too—it’s just a bop. If I were listening to that song on the radio and it wasn’t The City Lines, I couldn’t help but bop along to it and roll down the window. We had a lot of fun with the storytelling of it, and there are some Ann Arbor references specifically, like “the north side.” That one feels so true to life, and there’s no hyperbole. If you want to know what’s going on with Pat Deneau, then it’s in that song.

BZ: That is such a Pat story. In that one, all I’m doing is editing and bouncing back some tighter lyrical formation. One of the fun things was that Pat would send it back, and he had two firefighter ties in a couple of places. He’d say, “We say squaring away, and we say voice in the ceiling.”

PD: One piece of common nomenclature from the fire department—at least in Ann Arbor—is used in the middle of the night when we get woken up for a call. We’ll say, “The voice in the ceiling told us to go.” There is also a spiritual element involved with it, and there’s a line that says, “In the hands of higher powers.” I’m talking about the voice in the ceiling, which, in this case, is the higher power.

Q: “Blood and Smoke” explores your heritage as a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and a desire to learn more about your past. How did writing this song help you embrace your authentic self? 

PD: I really love the production on that one, too. It sounds like a big alternative-rock anthem, and I love the reverby, washy guitars. It feels like a river to me. We try to make these organic-sounding songs, and that one feels like you’re at Tahquamenon Falls and the water is just rushing. [In the song], we’re asking, “Is the river washing away heritage? Is it taking it to another place? Do you hop in the river and ride it, or do you stand in the river and hold pat and capture what you can?” That’s what that feels like to me. Everything came from that.

BZ: That is a special song for us, and it was the first of the new cycle that we wrote. Nothing in the record is produced quite like that one, and that is the luxury we stretched for and invested in. That song is produced in a way to serve that story. This is about Pat finding Pat, but it’s also about the choices he gets to and wants to make for [his daughter], Isla. His heritage is her heritage, so like dads, we have to get our stuff together to know what to pass on and to be good stewards of that legacy.

Q: “Wildfire Skies” highlights the dangers of climate change and its impact on the planet. How does it serve as a call-to-action for protecting the environment? 

PD: That song is the first song on the second side of the record. When Kat Steih’s vocals kick in, I’m thinking, “Whoa! It sends me to another place.” It’s got the cool gang vocals, Bob’s doing that driving [sound], and it keeps going back to that [sound]. Bob took the lead on the theme and the feeling of that one. It’s happening right now, and it’s gonna happen again in 30 days and in 30 years. It’s saying, “Hey, sorry, we can’t go out and play on the swing set.”

BZ: I work in that space full-time—communications in an environmental nonprofit. For me, the language is right there. This is where I spend all my weekdays talking about this stuff, and I’m there because I’m worried about it. Pat and I are both constituents concerned about this issue because we want our kids to have it better than we have it on this topic, and on this topic, they’re going to have it worse. The science is there. The interventions now will hopefully help their kids and grandkids have a better time, but we’ve made mistakes as a species that are going to haunt our living kids.

Q: “Out Loud” is about dealing with drinking as a coping mechanism and taking steps to stop it. How did writing this song help you confront that struggle? 

PD: I’ve been telling Bob for two years that I’ve been worried about talking about this. For some reason, it felt embarrassing, and the first line of the song is talking about how I quit drinking alcohol. I got goosebumps just saying that out loud, and I wouldn’t say I was having a problem that was tearing my family apart. But it was becoming a problem, and it was affecting my mental health. It was a very habitual thing, and what I found, especially working in public safety, is that the two shouldn’t be together. They do often end up together at retirement parties, softball games, or hockey games. What I found was that I was coming home from work, and I’m ready for a beer. I thought, “It can’t be like that every day,” or at least for me, it couldn’t.

That got harder before it got better, and a lot of my identity I felt was tied to drinking beer. Being a tough fireman and being able to drink as many beers as I wanted whenever I wanted. When you factor in having a kid, it is no longer a sustainable thing. I think that through the process of quitting drinking and writing this record, I had a lot of clarity. Therapy helps, and having a spouse or partner who backs you is great.

Q: Prescribed Fires includes collaborations with several local artists. What did they add to the album’s songs? 

BZ: The people who worked with us on this, starting with Kat Steih, who I play with [in Kat Steih & The Ferals], said yes immediately. We wrote a part for her in her range on “Wildfire Skies.” Alex Anest is in that same band, too, and he plays a brilliant steel guitar on “The Bear.”

Ryan Allen, who’s from Detroit, has been really supportive of us. We consider him the power-pop mayor of Detroit because he plays in nine bands. His collaboration on the Springsteen cover, “Atlantic City,” was so perfectly him because we asked him to do a vocal spot. And then he said, “Take it or leave it, but I also play guitar and bass,” and we said, “We’ll take it.” [Twin Deer’s] Bill [Kahler] and Megan [Marcoux] are on this record in exciting ways, especially with both of them playing on “Out Loud” and Megan playing flute on “Ash and Ember.”

And Rob Luzynski’s spoken-word piece at the end of “Wildfire Skies,” there’s a reason it’s in that song. He and I work at the same environmental nonprofit, and I knew that he had poetry and spoken word roots. Topically, he’s someone else who knew all the words, and he knows the language of climate change. He’s just a strong writer and a strong performer, and it was cool to hear that side of him.

Q: What plans do you have for your October 24 album release show at Ziggy’s? 

BZ: Folks can expect to hear a lot of the new songs that night as we celebrate the record’s debut properly. That means all of our friends out there have five weeks from the streaming release to learn all these new lyrics and sing loudly at Ziggy’s so that Pat can jump around a little extra. I mean, he’ll do that anyway now that we have conscripted Johnny Scott from Good Man’s Brother to play the lead guitar for us on stage, so we’re really going to need you all to do your part.

Q: Kat Steih & The Ferals and Carmel Liburdi will be performing at the album release show as well. What will they help bring to the show that night? 

BZ: We’ve never actually played a show with Kat Steih & The Ferals, but I’m really excited to meet their drummer because I hear he’s handsome and cool. Even better, Kat contributed an amazing vocal performance to the song “Wildfire Skies” on this new record, and Alex [Anest] played steel guitar on “The Bear.” The odds of either/both of those things happening live are medium-high. As for Carmel Liburdi, we just love her songwriting and consider her craft a real inspiration and high bar to aspire to for the storytelling on Prescribed Fires.

Q: What’s up next for The City Lines after the album release show? 

BZ: After two concentrated years of writing and recording, I think we’re pretty excited to just be a band for a while, you know? We’ll play plenty of our own shows, we’ll support our friends’ shows, we’ll support our [spouses], we’ll raise our kids, we’ll do our jobs, and with any luck, we’ll catch up on a little sleep before the next cycle begins.

The City Lines perform October 24 with Kat Steih & The Ferals and Carmel Liburdi at Ziggy’s, 206 West Michigan Avenue, Ypsilanti.