About Experiencing Feelings of Joy

“There was this huge amount of time where music was connected to a fair amount of pain for me,” The Jungle Giants’ Sam Hales tells Apple Music. The group’s fifth studio album is, despite its title, mired in sadness: Vocalist/guitarist and lead songwriter Hales wrote it in the wake of his split from his fiancée, Confidence Man vocalist Grace Stephenson (aka Janet Planet). He also decided to leave that band, which he’d co-founded with his ex. Hales likens each song to a step on a ladder he had to climb to recover from the heartbreak. “I needed to go in on them to get over each one,” he explains. “And by the end, that’s when joy happened again.” Though far from downbeat musically, there is a lyrical melancholy to the four-on-the-floor indie dance of “Where Can I Put All My Love,” while nostalgia ripples through the happy-sad “How Can I Replace You.” Here, Hales takes Apple Music through Experiencing Feelings of Joy, track by track. “Tell Me How It Feels” “When I was struggling with the record, I did The Artist’s Way [a self-help book and program to help people rediscover their creativity]. It encourages you to go back to your origins—why did I start music? What was music to me? And it got me thinking about my mum, who was a single Irish mother, total badass. She always encouraged music, so I wanted to sing about this time. And it became about mum.” “A Moment Like That” “When you’re in the depths of a breakup, you have this moment of like, ‘When the hell will I ever feel [love] again?’ This song is me imagining that love can happen again. Essentially manifesting, and a mantra for myself—a moment like that will come and I can’t wait.” “Where Can I Put All My Love” “When you’re used to loving someone every day, you would assume that light turns off when you break up. But for me it was still on. I had all this intention to love and I didn’t know where to put it. Even by saying that, it really helped me embrace where I was at the time.” “All the Time in the World” “I have this phase in the record that I call the delusion phase. My imagination was helping me embrace that you’re feeling like this now, you won’t feel like this forever. So then I would imagine the later phase. Now I’m fully in love. And she’s here. She’s the only girl for me. And I’m celebrating us. This is me putting myself in the shoes of future me.” “How Can I Replace You” “I was sorrowful. How am I ever going to replace you? The sound of that song was representing how I felt because it has a lot of sadness and nostalgia. But then there is also this switch into hope, which is exactly how my heart was feeling—I feel terrible, but maybe one day I’ll feel better.” “In a Nice Way” “This one is a reflection of the relationship I have with my ex. We’re really good friends. Even though there was heartbreak that went into this album, there’s also a celebration that we did such a good job of breaking up. That needed to be spoken to, in a nice way.” “Are You Seeing Anyone?” “We’ve gone back to the delusion phase of the album. We’ve broken up and now I’m going to parties, meeting people. And I was like, ‘How the hell do you flirt? How do I speak to this cute girl?’ And I was like, ‘All right, she’s right there on the couch. She’s going home soon. You should say it now: “Are you seeing anyone?”’ I wanted to sing about this funny, clunky way that I was attempting to date.” “Lovesick” “This one is essentially a letter to Grace. She moved to the UK and I was at home. I was sitting at the piano. And I just started singing to her. It felt really nice and therapeutic just to talk to her, even though she wasn’t there.” “Is It Love?” “This is a really important song for the record. When you break up, all you remember is the good stuff. Then as you get over it, you start to remember the reasons why we broke up. What I was doing there was singing about the bad stuff. I was singing about the reasons why we broke up.” “World’s Getting Smaller” “This song is just pure sad. Grace and I paid the price for nurturing each other’s dreams. As we built these careers, we got further apart. This is just a reflection of that. The world got smaller, but we got further away. It was a sad price to pay. We succeeded, but we forgot to stay in love.”