Boasting a sound they describe as unintentionally retro and effortlessly uncool, the Happy Somethings have been on my radar for a while now, so I was glad to have the opportunity to reach out and ask them a few questions…

Who’s in the Happy Somethings, and who does what?

We are Happy, Jolly and Joy (real names!). Apart from Joy being the main vocalist, everything else is pretty random. Joy’s recently developed a taste for the keyboards and likes percussive things, and Happy and Jolly are the main guitarists but everything is literally up for grabs. Occasionally someone else will find themselves co-opted to lend a hand or two and we all contribute to the songwriting process – so The Happy Somethings are a messy collective really!

Your Bandcamp bio describes the Happy Somethings as “independently unpolished.” What does it mean to be unpolished, and why is that a good thing?

Think unpolished refers to the way we record. We all like live-sounding studio recordings with a bit of looseness where you can hear a bit of the clunk and clatter. That doesn’t mean we’re slapdash or content to leave in obvious mistakes but we’re not after ‘clinical’ results and prefer things to sound a bit more ‘relaxed’ shall we say. We don’t remove every click, tiny glitch or string buzz. It’s good for us to be like this as it frees up space to be creative and not obsess about things. There’s always a lot of pre-noodling that goes on individually, then when the opportunity arises and we’re all good to go, we really crack on with things and can be spontaneous with what we’ve got. We often find the ingredients separately but like to cook together. We record things pretty much live to a click track or basic drum beat and then make sense of it all afterwards. To stretch the metaphor, we may then add a few musical condiments where required.

You also describe yourselves as unintentionally retro and effortlessly uncool — which I think is pretty cool. What contributes to your retro sound?  

Don’t we all eventually become retro ha ha? The Happy Somethings don’t use the most modern equipment so there are inevitable limitations to what we can do and we’re suckers for melodies and harmonies. We’re not looking to push any musical boundaries. So maybe that adds up to being unintentionally retro… We’re certainly not trying for a retro sound, it’s just the way it turns out sometimes.

And of course it does all come round again anyway, as we covered in our song ‘Retro Is Nouveau’ a few years ago:

So maybe we’re not retro afterall…

And what, for you, is the dividing line between cool and uncool? 

We’re not sure there is a line – think it’s possibly more of a circle! Maybe the circle of people you spend time with dictates if you feel cool or otherwise. You’re always only one step away from feeling cool or uncool… That jumper, or sound, or cheese plant might seem dated or a bit sad to one person and exciting and current to another. It’s a bit of a retro/nouveau thing again. We might try out ideas and experiment but we don’t do something just to keep up with whatever is popular or current. Guess it’s about being confident doing your own thing, being yourself and doing it for fun. That’s the most important thing to us.

Maybe being uncool is the closest to cool we can get!

The Subjangle label puts out your music. How did you become involved with them?

We’ve always liked to make our music available for free directly from our own Bandcamp page. More recently, we’ve been lucky enough to have Subjangle release some of our songs on CD. A couple of years ago we came across them on Twitter and thought it might be worth sending them a jangly song, ‘Forward Now’, in the hope they might do a short review for the Janglepophub blog. To our delight, Darrin Lee (Subjangle founder) liked it and asked if we wanted to put out a selection of our back catalogue with them on CD. We still get to keep all our music available for free download but Subjangle offer a more ‘solid’ possibility for people who like to use more senses than just their hearing!

Your new EP is called Love Songs, but the songs contained therein aren’t what I’d call “typical” of the genre. Rather than professions of love as is often the case, these songs interrogate the concept of love. Was that the intention? 

We didn’t have a clear intention. It was more a case of writing the songs and once we’d gathered a few together the EP title emerged. It was originally going to be called ‘Public Relations’ but then we realised that they all fitted the bill of ‘warped love songs’! We’ve grown to like the idea of having the clichéd ‘Love Songs’ title in our collection. It amuses us!

One of the songs on the album is called “Good Think,” which notes that it’s good to admit when we’re wrong. Why do you think that’s an important thing to do, and why are people so bad at it?

Well showing a bit of humility and being open can hopefully allow for mistakes and misdemeanors to be acknowledged – not just to others but also to ourselves. Maybe we can then learn from them, make necessary changes and then move on to become better people? Maybe…

But admitting we’re wrong (if indeed we realise we are) can be a difficult thing to do for all sorts of reasons – saving face, shame, feelings of inferiority, just plain denial or a simple personality trait. Our egos may not want us to accept we could possibly get something wrong! We can fear rejection, judgement, punishment or being seen as weak. Or maybe some of us are just really thick-skinned and arrogant ha ha!

We like the way you’ve gradually turned this into a therapy session!

That’s one of my specialties! How might the world be better—and, speaking to the EP’s main theme, how might relationships benefit from learning to admit when we’re wrong?

Blimey, you’re making us dig even deeper…

Always!

If we can manage to admit we’re wrong, and feel that it’s okay to be wrong, wouldn’t it make relationships of all kinds more authentic, stronger, resilient and pleasant? In an optimistic state of mind, it can feel that might translate to everything being fairer, safer and more peaceful. In a pessimistic mood that doesn’t seem remotely possible because it would require a massive shift in consciousness for the whole world. But imagine the collective sigh of relief if we managed it.

I’m also thinking of the track “I Love My Shoes (more than you love me).” There’s a kind of dialog going on in that one — a conversation about love and relationships that ends on an ambivalent note: “We can’t be broken/We must be open/but I love my shoes more than you love me.” What was the inspiration for that song?

We can’t remember what originally inspired this song – it was written a while ago. Think the title probably came from a throwaway remark – but we obviously didn’t throw it away. We do sometimes like writing songs that express ambivalence – maybe it’s capturing our contradictory attitudes and feelings? We’ve written about quite a lot of subjects very specifically and they’ve been quite intense and serious. Think being ambiguous or seemingly ambivalent can open lyrics up to interpretation – which is something we like – but that does also open up the possibility that we write something we think is positive, ironic and funny but others’ hear it as negative, sarcastic or bitter. Guess we ultimately make our own meanings whatever was originally intended – but sometimes it feels good to expand possibilities rather than close them down.

That probably makes it sound much more intentional than it is… Perhaps we should also say that we often don’t really know what we’re writing about until it’s finished – and we’ve had the chance to interpret it ourselves!

And the irony of the final track, “Song About You,” is striking, particularly in a line towards the end: “You were the center of attention now you don’t even get a mention.” It really speaks to how difficult it can be to move on from something, particularly a relationship. That’s less of a question than an observation, I suppose, but feel free to comment!

Maybe we could throw that one back to you Marc – it seems you might be speaking from the heart? Think we might have been channelling our contrary sides with that song – in addition to the ambivalence and ambiguity ha ha…

Uh… No comment! What’s on the horizon for you? 

Well, talking of being uncool (or is spelling it ‘unkool’ cooler?), we’ve just been finishing off a couple of new Christmas songs. We put out a twelve-track album last year called ‘Don’t Mention It’ (you kindly played one of the songs on the Tweetcore Radio Hour) that was a sort of ‘seasonally appropriate’ collection and hopefully offered an alternative soundtrack. It featured some tracks that weren’t originally written as festive songs at all but seemed to fit. It went down surprisingly well and this year we’re releasing it again – adding quite a few more ‘repurposed tracks’ and alternative versions of songs – together with the two brand new ones. We keep promising ourselves that we won’t write any more Christmas songs… we’re not exactly fans of the genre!

We’ve also recently set up an on-line shop which is something we’ve talked about doing for a while. It’s not an income-generating thing and any small amounts of money we might receive from sales will be donated to Cancer Research. We’ve always drawn and painted for fun – including creating ‘artwork’ for the band – and after a few requests from people for some of the images to be on t-shirts, mugs etc we’ve finally made it possible. It feels good to us as it’s another way of putting ourselves out there and finding outlets for our creative endeavours while possibly raising a bit of cash for something important.

And for next year we’ve got lots of half-baked ideas for new songs which will no doubt simmer away – and we’ll be tending to them individually until the time is right – then we’ll cook up another storm together…Think that metaphor should finish there!

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! 

Thank you Marc – your questions were unexpected, interesting and thought-provoking.