PREMIERE | Occurrence, "The Happy Years"

Occurrence's Johnny Hager, Ken Urban and Cat Hollyer; photographed by Cameron Scoggins

“He doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time he feels it, a tremendous crash crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car […] he is already aloft, being ejected into the air. […] He sees a flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from his body and suspended against a black sky.”

— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

This is the literary work that lent inspiration to Occurrence’s new track “The Happy Years”, debuted with the accompanying visual by Tamar Giligashvili. The group's Ken Urban and Johnny Hager were both reading Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life simultaneously around the time they first met, drawing further inspiration from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse that would ultimately be channeled into their new album I Have So Much Love to Give. A group completed with Hallmark writer/creative Cat Hollyer, the trio created a work drawn from life's experiences of relationships, love and loss that examines the intimate intricacies of connective human bonds that bend, extend and break beyond the yin and yang polarities and polemics.

"The Happy Years" operates on an aesthetic like a creative collection of home movies edited in accordance to the rhythms and expressions of the heart pouring narratives in play. With a sound and visual style reminiscent of the electro art brush strokes of .paperman, the beats and boops collect together in a bouquet of experiences and amorous expressions that recall anecdotes from the good years, the great years, the trying years and everything in between. The profound chorus repetitions of happy queers make, happy years make encompasses snapshots of everything from the utter abandon of loverly bliss, the thrills and heights of ecstatic pleasure beyond all metric calculation, measure and tabulation, the fights, the breaking up, making up and the bonding glue of forgiveness that pieces couples together whole again.

Tamar Giligashvili's video bops to the botanical pulse of "The Happy Years" where the audience is pulled into the universe of Occurrence's privy sounds and visions of love, longing and collected emotive touchstones. From the flashing polychromatic dance floor luster of lights, field and valley choreographed calisthenics, forward and reversal images of vehicles both passing and diverting from one another, street scenes and the group's visages seen in the low lit glow of reds, blues, greens, purples, yellow and more — Occurrence bathes the viewer and listener in the light of an illustrious love that encapsulates the variety of tenets and testaments of what love is (and what love can be). We are let in on the group's road movies of passing landscapes that spin like a zoetrope, to the voyeuristic monochrome view of surveillance cam footage to the down home hand cam aesthetic spliced everywhere in the mix. Occurrence offers a unique peek into what loving is truly all about. The brilliance of the video is that it further relays that relationships are not always about the highs and lows but also the mundane, tedious and procedural components of the day to day. The long and sometimes uncomfortable silences. The multitasking arts of getting by, the boring and remedial things that occur when life is going on (that few to none really discuss in the self-help handbooks), to the celestial places that can be discovered when one opens up their heart to someone else in the act of foregoing the trappings of ego and self serving interests for something greater and bigger than can ever be imagined or described in succinct phrasing or the finite shortcomings of language.

A triptych capture of Occurrence; photographed by Cameron Scoggins

Ken & Johnny provided some exclusive and insightful reflections on “The Happy Years”:

Ken: I wrote the music when I was out in the woods of Washington state. I was thinking about the novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, specifically the chapter called “The Happy Years.” After so many awful and disturbing events, there comes a moment where things reach an equilibrium, a sense of happiness for these characters. In the chapter’s final pages, it is all taken away. That sense of happiness becoming loss, that guided the music. Johnny loved the novel too, so when I played the demo for him, he jumped on the chance to write lyrics inspired by the book. Cat joined in for some excellent harmonies. This song went through many different versions before we landed on the final. I asked Christian Frederickson from Rachel’s to play viola to some string parts I had written. Daniel contributed some backwards guitar. He kept hounding me replace the MIDI guitar I played on the verses with the real thing. But I loved the fake one too much, so I kept it.

Creative bonding with Occurrence; photographed by Cameron Scoggins.

Johnny: I loved A Little Life. Ken and I read it together when we first started dating. I felt the story with every fiber in my being. So when Ken suggested a song called “The Happy Years,” I knew exactly what he was talking about, so I wrote some lyrics that suggested my memories of that one chapter. The moments of happiness are precious and you want to hold on to them as long as you can. I wanted to write about love and loss. I wanted to craft a catchy melody that would make you feel good, then surprise you at the end with an unexpected (or perhaps expected?) sense of loss, like the one I felt when I finished that chapter in the novel. How many times have we not wanted a lover to come back and be with you forever?

Beyond the brink of happenstance with Occurrence; photographed by Cameron Scoggins.

Ken: During the pandemic, I was keeping a video record of the city, of our neighborhood Washington Heights, of our brief escapes out of the city when we could get away, of missing Cat since we couldn’t be together. I shared all that footage with Tamar Giligashvili, who we worked with on the video. We wanted it to feel like a discovered VHS cassette.

Occcurence’s I Have So Much Love To Give will be available August 20 via Archie & Fox Records.

Cover art for Occurrence’s album I Have So Much Love To Give; courtesy of the artists.