Happy Abandon
Fresh from performing Athens Popfest at the local 40 Watt Club; Chapel Hill by Carrboro NC’s Happy Abandon offered up a listen alongside some exclusive thoughts all about their band new single “Severed Seams”. Featured off their forthcoming album Facepaint available August 25 through Schoolkids Records; Peter Vance, Jake Waits, Justin Ellis & Alex Thompson imbibe in the kind of ambitious reaching styles of arrangements that exhibit an elaborate array of strings & spirit to electrify a thousand festival stages.
“Severed Seams” arrives with gallops of chords & percussion that finds the North Carolina band fusing rustic Americana elements together to create the contemporary synthesis of the Happy Abandon aesthetic. This is the sound of what happens when those individuals ties & strings are snipped like the anchoring ropes & strings that tie down hot air balloons & zeppelins where tethers to earth are torn in the name of new discoveries & intrigues. With the cables cut, the ethos of Happy Abandon’s gleeful mode of abandoning what they deem to be useless conventions creates a skyward drifting progression where “Seams” bursts from the bows & beams to sail upward & onward toward enlightened new echelons of the most high.
Peter Vance of Happy Abandon penned the following insightful reflections on the new single & more:
“Severed Seams” marks the transition between my older roots of folky, acoustic, singer-songwriter music into the more dynamic, ambient, and cinematic sound that is found in the songs that I write for Happy Abandon. The song fell into a period of my life where I found myself floating about “aimlessly. The song itself talks of discomfort in the domestic lifestyle that comes from being a young adult, and transitioning into new and unexplored facets of life. Sometimes this wanderlust requires disconnecting from the comforts you relied on. That’s exactly what I was doing at the time. But I found comfort in other places. Jake and I began to hash out the songs I had been writing, and Severed Seams was one of the first, if not the first. It has always felt like the best representation of what Happy Abandon is all about; intimate and thoughtful, yet dramatic and intense. We take great care to convey musically what the lyrics are trying to convey. A soundscape for which the words can comfortably lie upon. I’m exuberant that “Severed Seams set the bar for what Happy Abandon would eventually become. We chose to release “Severed Seams” first for this exact reason. We think it perfectly represents the general vibes of the album, and we cannot be more proud.
Happy Abandon’s album Facepaint will be available August 25 via Schoolkids Records.
