Last summer we got an invigorating new single from former Candy Hearts singer Mariel Loveland, who’s shifted into her new role fronting the group Best Ex. Today she’s following that up with a second track, as well as the title of the EP the songs will appear on: “On my Mind” is the second single from Good at Feeling Bad, which will be released May 22 via No Sleep Records.
Following her debut EP Ice Cream Anti Social from 2017, which premiered her shift from pop-punk into a more indie-tronic sound, the EP has been a long time coming, and feels more than a little cathartic for Loveland: “I think it captures the full spectrum of the loneliness and isolation I was feeling at the time I wrote it,” she says. “My disillusionment with certain friendships and relationships. My disillusionment with our culture of social media and celebrity. My disillusionment with genuine, unconditional love. I think Andy Tongren did the best job a single human could have possibly done in capturing the sounds in my head. To me, this EP is a middle finger from a woman who’s over it and finds happiness regardless of the things that constantly try to knock us down.”
With the video for “On My Mind” premiering today, we get a sense of the record’s mood with the song’s pulsing optimism in the face of Loveland’s expressed terror at what the future may bring, while the rainy Coney Island–shot visual echoes this moody/joyful dichotomy. Watch it below, and read on for Loveland’s explanation for the track’s origin, as well as the EP’s more broadly.
Good at Feeling Bad out May 22 via No Sleep Records.
This song is about the terrible feeling of getting lost in someone else’s life. When I wrote it, I had been living on and off in England for the last few years with my then-boyfriend and his family. I started to realize over the course of our relationship that my life completely dissolved into his, which I think can happen when you’re dealing with a partner who’s suffering from depression. I had become so obsessed with caring for him and making him happy that one day I woke up with an entirely different life in a foreign country. I had completely new friends, new routines, a new job, a new family, and a new record label in England, and I didn’t even realize it.
The thing was, I loved my life there, and he was getting better. The future looked fantastic, so when he decided to dump me in a short phone call right before the holidays, it felt like someone had broken in and robbed me of my entire life in the middle of the night. I spent all of Christmas crying and the entire New Year’s begging my mom to come pick up from my brother’s house. A few months later, I wrote this song.
Thankfully, that experience did bring me a few awesome shows in the UK and my relationship with Alcopop Records, a label I had always loved from afar. I’m also pretty thrilled with this song, and since then, I realized a weight has sort of been lifted. I actually feel like I have my life back. Like it’s no longer chained to someone’s ever-shifting moods, and I get to be an actual, living, breathing human. This video was a big thing deeply tied to that because he had promised to help me film it, but decided I wasn’t capable of making something like this on my own. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he won’t even hold a camera for a couple of hours, and I’ve moved my entire life to fit into his. That really sucks, but I don’t need his permission to make art.’
Like most indie projects, we operate on a shoestring budget. I have no financial partners, and rely heavily on friends to help me out. So, after he said that, I bought a camera, hired an all-female crew of pals kind enough to work for peanuts because they believed in my vision, and I directed it myself. It’s meant to be sort of a continuation of the video for ‘See You Again.’ That video is the high, and this one is the low. The difference between Coney Island at the height of summer and Coney Island at 6 a.m. in a freezing, rainy January.
