Mark Mallman Shares New Album 'Happiness' Today

Minnesota musician and memoirist Mark Mallman celebrates the release of Happiness, his first album in five years, with a video for the song title track "Happiness." He also announces an April 29 livestream show to support the new album via NoonChorus. Link to tickets is here.

Mallman says, "A happy video feels like a hyperpop sugar rush or a birthday cake. The video has folks moving in the street from all over the world to celebrate through music and dancing. This is the funky merger. It's a bop!"

Mallman has also started a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a special yellow 140-gram vinyl versions of Happiness. The vinyl is being made by Kindercore Records, in Athens, GA, a boutique plant known throughout the industry for their gold standard vinyl. The vinyl version has been remastered by Jesse Mangum. The link to the vinyl can be found here.

Happiness is a companion to Mallman's uplifting memoir, The Happiness Playlist: The True Story of Healing My Heart With Feel-Good Music. The book follows Mallman's listening to nothing but a playlist of 50 feel-good songs for an entire Minnesota winter. His goal was to process the crushing grief and anxiety following the suicide of his mother. This is the true story of a man beset by grief, healed by music, and learning to laugh through it all. The book, published in 2019, includes a foreword by Chuck Klosterman. While the subject is sad and dark, the book itself is told with humor and joy.

The album Happiness, is a collection of material he wrote while writing and touring the book as well as one year after. Like the book, it explores the depth of emotions of the human experience, staring happy at track one to loss and devastation by track eleven. It has the great Twin Cities pedigree with the area's legends Prince, The Hold Steady, Lizzo, and Hüsker Dü swimming in its DNA. Mark worked with some great talent to help him with having the album mixed by John Fields (Jonas Brothers), Aaron Cupping (Tropical f Storm), Adrian Olsen (Foxygen) among others. The psychedelic ballad "We Are We" features a guest guitar by Deerhoof member Ed Rodriguez. Happiness comes out via Eagle's Golden Tooth.

Listen to "Happiness" here:

Photo Credit: Alexandria Harland

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