CANDY HEARTS

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy

Kind of Like Records

As her senior year at college crept to a close, Mariel Loveland felt excited to face the world for the first time, but the singer and guitarist for Candy Hearts also felt isolated. She explains, “A lot of my friends, who were all musicians, took their separate bands and did different things. They were supporting each other, but I felt very unsupported and very apart from people who I used to rely on. It was kind of a lonely time for me.”

In response to these conflicted feelings, Loveland turned to her guitar, holed herself up in her bedroom and wrote the twelve songs that make up Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy, Candy Hearts' second full-length and the follow-up to 2010's Ripped Up Jeans and Silly Dreams. Featuring Loveland, guitarist Kris Hayes, bassist Christian Stefos Migliorese, and drummer Christina Picciano, the record, released by Kind of Like Records on September 27, 2011, deals with the duality presented in its title—that nagging feeling of unfulfillment that follows one around despite the recognition that everything almost always works out.

This duality exists in individual songs like “Sleepy Kisses,” which finds Loveland's protagonist driving around with someone she loves and drunkenly singing songs to him, but wondering endlessly about how it will feel when she doesn't know him anymore. “Everything for the character in that song is going really well and that person's really happy,” she explains, “but she can't stop thinking about when they won't be. Even though they are happy, she ruins it for herself.”

Candy Hearts have a way of combining these conflicted lyrics with the sort of peppy, sunny sounding rock 'n' roll songs—the sort that serve as the perfect soundtrack to driving around the suburbs in the summer at dusk—which only adds to the emotional incongruency existing in songs like “Everything's Alright”, the album's closing track in which Loveland insists that she's alright despite feeling confused and frustrated, or “Jawbreaker”, which juxtaposes lyrics about a ruined relationship with liberated images of driving around with friends and belting the lyrics to “Chesterfield King”.

Loveland is set to face the world again—this time with a second, more mature record— and feels more confident than she felt leaving college, but realizes that there may be no escape from these feelings of unfulfillment. “When I thought about my life when I was thirteen and about where I would be now,” she admits, “It's exactly the way I thought it would be and what I hoped it would be, but it doesn't feel like enough.” If these feelings push her to write records like Everything Amazing and Nobody's Happy, it may be for the better