Let’s month, while I was writing a Newsletter issue focused on Valentine’s Day, I started thinking about what were some of my favorite music and movies surrounding the theme and noticed that they all had heavy doses of melancholy (or even sadness) applied to them, which got me thinking that even the so-called romantic movies, always takes us through a journey of lots of suffering before we can see the characters finally enjoying happier times. And if you look at LGBTQ+ movies, most of the time not even the ending is happy, but that’s a discussion for another time.
“All I ever had to say about love is a sad song” — sings Hayley at the beginning of “Trigger”, one of my favorite songs of her new album that I can’t stop listening to. When I heard those words, I knew that I was on the right path associating sadness to love, even though we normally tend to think about happiness when we talk about love in the real world. “FLOWERS for VASES / descansos” is a much different album from her debut “Petals for Armor”, released less than a year ago as her first effort detached from being the frontwoman of Paramore. Both records are incredibly good in their own different ways, but there’s something about this recent one that just touched me differently. Maybe it’s the more minimal, stripped-down arrangements, maybe it’s the general theme of the lyrics, maybe its the intimacy and honesty we can feel through the whole recording, which was done at her home, where she wrote and played every single instrument we hear.