Hungover’s new album, When It Touches The Heart, Everything Resolves was released today. For the occasion, we asked the band to tell us about each track. Their commentary on the album can be seen below.
Track 1 - Candy Flip
When I first joined Hungover, I could often be found exploring psychedelia and looking for the answers to the universe out in the woods somewhere. The album opens here following a younger version of myself who felt written off by the people in his life and was given a false sense of validation through his own delusion leading to arrogance. After a profound trip and an ego death, he tries to reconfigure his life and explores what it means to make yourself and your loved ones proud.
Track 2 - Think Straight
This song takes on the idea of trying to rediscover who you are after a long time away from yourself. Your life can keep moving forward while you’re not paying attention. The dissonance between who you’ve become and what you thought you were can make things confusing. Everything feels loud. You have to acknowledge what your reality, but sometimes you just don’t want to hear it.
Track 3 - Out of Body
Dodging texts, task paralysis, and avoidance can sever relationships you never meant to. Sometimes that means neglecting the people you love most. I knew I needed help, but feeling like a burden to the people who surrounded me forced me to push them away. When I got better, I had to mend certain relationships and that wasn’t easy. In some cases, there were things I couldn’t fix so I had to seek the closure that I forced people to find themselves.
Track 4 - Reunion
The first lyrically fun track on the record covers the idea of friendships that never seem to burnout. Distance and time don’t damper the vibes. Some of the long lost friends from the previous track have gone their own way, but others can forgive your absence easily and pick up right where you left off.
This song is especially dedicated to the friends I grew up and came into adulthood with. Starting from Gregs house when were just leaving high school and ending in Zekes garage apartment that was located in a community that shared a name with this song.
Track 5 - Shake It Off
Anyone who has been a fan of Hungover since the beginning knows that it has been an interesting journey with a lot of ups and downs. This songs touches on the moment where we were all able to get over our own personal demons and make the choice to continue being a band after a previously unmentioned hiatus.
Track 6 - Hard to Tell
A companion song to Irish Goodbye from our previous record, WILT. Some time after releasing a track where I was very open about being abandoned by my father and then talking to people all over the country about how they shared similar experiences, I finally met the guy. While on tour, I was contacted by a person that ended up being my sister and found out I had three siblings that I never knew existed.
The conversations to follow eventually led to meeting them and unexpectedly, my biological parent. Whether I realizes it or not: I blamed myself for years. This meeting gave me the opportunity to express things that had been on my mind my entire life and helped me realize that Im fine without that relationship. Hard to Tell addresses a lot of what I was feeling in the weeks following that encounter.
Track 7 - Kayfabe
Kayfabe (for those of y’all that aren’t wrestling marks) is defined by Oxford Languages as the fact or convention of presenting stage performances as genuine or authentic.
This song focuses on the ego death the occurred in the first song on the record. It goes back to a moment in time where I didn’t like who I was and realized I needed to change it. I was portraying a version of myself that always felt like an act.
Track 8 - Slow Emotion
This song is written from the perspective of reflection during a period of progress. You know you're moving forward, but when you look in the mirror, the things that you haven’t forgiven yourself for/let go off distort what you see. Theres a part of you that knows how easy it would be to go back, but theres so much promise on the other side if you keep going. When you finally get through the filter you’ve placed on yourself, you can finally get to work on the root of all your problems.
Track 9 - Bad Things
Bad Things is about the in between. The pandemic has just started and we weren’t sure if it made sense to still be a band. The lyrics are laced with references to ghosts of Hungover’s past. Verse two leans in on the back and forth we had for months trying to decide what was best for everyone.
Track 10 - Voodoo
A companion song to Fever from WILT; building on the idea that temptation is like a rising temperature that can affect your mood, controlling you like a voodoo doll.
Track 11 - Vanishing Act
You’re not growing up if you’re not losing friends, or so Ive been told. This song touches on the other side of losing friends. While towards the beginning of the recording, the lyrics lean more on being left behind or coming together: Vanishing Act explores the idea of cutting off loose ends to move forward (calling back to the motif of WILT/When I Lose Touch). Sometimes when someone holds you close, they’re also holding you back.
