Watch Occurrence’s new “Boy Joy” video; I Have So Much Love To Give is due 8/20 on Archie & Fox Records
I Have So Much Love To Give is out on 8/20 via Archie & Fox Records
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WATCH: “Boy Joy” –
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photo credit: Cameron Scoggins
Today Occurrence are sharing “Boy Joy,” the third single/video from their forthcoming LP. Watch the video here. Occurrence’s I Have So Much Love To Give is due August 20th via Archie & Fox Records. In case you’ve missed the previous singles, be sure to check out “The Happy Years” & “I Have So Much Love To Give.”
Primary songwriter, Ken Urban, gave some background on how the track came to be:
“The beat for “Boy Joy” had been around awhile; I made it before our first album even came out, but wasn’t sure it could become a song. When we started recording the new album, I played Cat the latest version of the demo and things started to click. I remember Cat kept asking me if the lyrics were too much, but I thought they were perfect; It felt like a horny song. When I started mixing the song, Daniel and I really broke it apart. We got inspired by the band Tunng for the chorus. I added piano and Daniel did some backwards acoustic guitar stuff. We also really processed Cat’s voce to create new melodies. It was one of the first mixes I played for Johnny and Cat. Their excitement let me know we were on the right path.”
Bio:
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 shit.”
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.
Occurrence
I Have So Much Love To Give
(Archie & Fox Records)
Street Date: August 20, 2021
Track List
1. I Have So Much Love to Give
2. Boy Joy
3. The Happy Years
4. The Preferred One
5. A Plea
6. Drift
7. Flies Dead Midair
8. Your Body Is Made of Flesh
9. Bad Sleep Well
10. My Eternal Autumn
11. A Parade of Regrets
12. I Had So Much Love to Give