Occurrence Releases New Video for 'The Happy Years'

Today Occurrence are sharing a new single/video that channels the emotional ups & downs of a relationship titled "The Happy Years" via Week In Pop. Check out the premiere here.

Occurrence's forthcoming LP, I Have So Much Love To Give, is due out on 8/20 via Archie & Fox Records.

Week In Pop gave praise to the track: "'The Happy Years' operates on an aesthetic like a creative collection of home movies edited in accordance to the rhythms and expressions of the heart pouring narratives in play ... the beats and boops collect together in a bouquet of experiences and amorous expressions that recall anecdotes from the good years, the great years, the trying years and everything in between."

Occurrence's swoon-worthy and heartbreaking new album I Have So Much Love To Give wasn't supposed to happen. But making music is sometimes a lot like binging a television show. When you've got a good storyline, it's hard to stop.

Everyone in Occurrence was a little fried after finishing their second album, Everyone Knows the Disaster Is Coming, and they all have a lot going on in their lives. Cat Hollyer writes for Hallmark and has four children, and her fellow Occurrence singer Johnny Hager teaches high school Spanish in New York City, while composer Ken Urban is busy both writing plays and teaching playwriting at MIT. (It seems like band life and playwriting life are starting to blend together for him. One of his most recent plays is Vapor Trail, which is named in honor of a classic song by shoegaze legends Ride and tells the story of a music journalist struggling with grief.)

Hollyer lives in Kansas, so Occurrence tries to get as much music done as possible during the pockets of time where they can all be in the same city. She visited a few more times, and pretty soon, everyone realized that, once again, they were working on an album. The breakthrough came with "A Parade of Regrets," a rumbling darkwave ballad that begins with the line, "Happiness will kill you slowly/Better off to make it quick." Once that song was finished, Urban realized his band had found a narrative framework for what would become their third album, and they had to keep going. Inspired by Roland Barthes' book A Lover's Discourse, Urban decided to structure I Have So Much Love To Give around the journey from a relationship's start to its end. "Side A is all about the joy of falling in love and the intense desire you feel for somebody else," he says. "And then Side B is when it all goes to s."

A musical theater performer and trained opera singer, Hager sang back-up on a few songs for Occurrence's debut The Past Will Last Forever (2016) and became an official member for the follow-up Everyone Knows the Disaster Is Coming (2018). "I feel like with Everyone Knows we were recording together, but we were still thinking 'This is a Cat song. This is a Johnny song.' And this one felt like, 'Oh, this is like our first album as a real band,'" says Urban. "So even though it feels very vulnerable, it also feels like we have the support of each other."

The result of that support is I Have So Much Love To Give, Occurrence's most cohesive album to date. Urban collaborated remotely with producer and sound designer Daniel Kluger via the software program ListenTo, which allowed them to finish mixing the album during Zoom sessions, with Urban bringing in Christian Frederickson from beloved band Rachel's to play viola on three tracks, and Kluger bringing actor-musician Peter Mark Kendall to play guitar on "The Preferred One." With I Have So Much Love To Give, Occurrence has made their best, most complete work yet, filled with both their most energetic anthems and tear-jerking ballads. Not bad at all for an album that wasn't even supposed to exist.

Photo Credit: Cameron Scoggins

To post a comment, you must register and login.