Kevin Bronson on April 26th, 2010

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[Disclosures: Linus of Hollywood is the answer to the trivia question “Who is the first artist to appear in the Buzz Bands column?” (October 2002, for his collaboration with Tim Burgess). Kay Hanley is a notorious Boston Red Sox fan whom I admire despite my lingering bitterness over the 2004 World Series, possibly because she wins cool mom honors for having her kids’ names tattooed on her arms.]

If it’s springtime, my thoughts have turned to baseball … and any band that has a ridiculously catchy song called “Here Comes the Summer.” So meet Palmdale:

The seeds for the collaboration that would become Palmdale were sown some five years ago when pop songsmiths Kay Hanley and Linus of Hollywood teamed up as songwriters-for-hire. “We got together and wrote a cheesy Hilary Duff-type pop song,” Linus says. “We reconnected on Facebook last summer and decided to start writing, keep the songs for ourselves and make them cool.”

If it sounds like a case of two music veterans having some fun, so do the results – the four originals on Palmdale’s recently released “Get Wasted!” EP crackle with the sunny, youthful energy of classic power-pop. Hanley, frontwoman of 1990s Boston alterna-poppers Letters to Cleo who, among other projects, sang the lead in the movie “Josie and the Pussycats” and toured as a backup singer in Miley Cyrus’ band, continues to defy age. Her crisp vocals range from playful to edgy to winsome – you could put Palmdale on tour with a band 20 years Hanley’s junior (say, Paramore) and it’d be a good sonic fit.

“Back when I was young / full of piss and bubblegum” indeed.

“It was a lot of fun to write for her voice,” says Linus (born Kevin Dotson), a songwriter/producer who’s worked with myriad commercial acts and released three solo albums. “A lot of Letter to Cleo fans are excited to have this new stuff. … We were doing things we wouldn’t do if we were writing for other artists – writing anti-choruses, sort of playing with song structures.”

||| Download: Palmdale’s cover of the 1996 Local H hit, “Bound for the Floor,” at We Are Palmdale, where you can also stream the whole EP.

||| Watch: The video for “Here Comes the Summer,” directed by Heath Balderston and Jaret Reddick:

Photo by Justine Ungaro