HEY OCEAN! VANCOUVER TRIO RETURNS WITH NEW ALBUM
Vancouver trio surfaces after four year hiatus with new album The Hurt of Happiness
Hey Ocean! drifted apart in 2014. Ashleigh Ball (vocals/flute), David Beckingham (vocals/guitars) and David Vertesi (vocals/bass) had a decade together touring, recording and releasing three, full-length albums and four EPs.
With the exception of performing at the yearly #SingItFwd to raise awareness about the importance of youth musical education and funds for the ongoing work of the St. James Music Academy, which supports over 300 children on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the band was on apparently permanent hiatus.
That is, until an announcement last July on the group’s Facebook page teased an upcoming fourth album, with the track Sleepwalker streaming on SoundCloud. This week, the independently released The Hurt of Happiness arrives.
“When we called it, we had sat down to start writing the next record and there just wasn’t the well to draw upon, we had all really grown tired of the project,” says David Beckingham. “It was like going to a job you didn’t want to be at. Thankfully, Vertesi had the strength to be the one to go, ‘I’m out, you two go ahead if you want,’ and we all agreed to break up.”
“Sitting there in Nuba off Main, I realized my role as the peacemaker totally failed and it was ending and total panic ensued,” said Ashleigh Ball. “We were faking it and it wasn’t fun anymore.”
The members may have hit an impasse collectively, but parting Hey Ocean! didn’t part the ocean. Individually, they remained some of the local scene’s most active artists.
Vertesi, co-founder of #SingItFwd, released his second solo album, Sad Dad Cruise Ship, and co-founded the Vancouver Mural Fest. Beckingham dropped the well-received Just When the Light album. Ball put out her solo debut, titled, Gold in You, as well as working in Vancouver’s film and TV industry. She grimaces at the mention she may have as many fans for voicing the characters of Applejack and Rainbow Dash in the series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as for her singing.
“As much as the break was really hard, we rekindled the relationships without the stress,” said Ball. “Until it came back to wanting to work together again.”
Experience and emotions form the core of The Hurt of Happiness’s nine tracks. From the bouncy-opener Amsterdam — with its reflection on love in a specific time and place — to the appropriately titled closing ballad To the Sea, the album is the lushest thing the trio has ever recorded. Lyrical depth and melodic maturity are everywhere. This is a very committed project.
“We had complete control and did things the way we wanted all through the recording process,” said Beckingham. “It’s fully independent, because we learned from our record deal with Universal and management-company experience that we could get further working that way.”
To underline how the group’s major-label experience went, Ball says the 2013 Junos was a pretty good indicator.
“There we were in Regina, our first Junos, nominated in the Breakout Group of the Year category and on the red carpet looking good and feeling great and our publicist just leaves us because Carly Rae Jepsen shows up and ‘she’s the priority,’ ” said Ball. “So we are left to walk the carpet alone and no one had anything to ask us and it was pretty tragic.” Hey Ocean! heads down the West Coast into the U.S. for six dates in April, plays Quebec City in July and is booked for the inaugural Skookum fest in Vancouver’s Stanley Park in September. More tour dates are coming as the word gets out that the band is back.
As long as it’s happy rather than hurting, Hey Ocean! has returned.