Indie pop has never been so sweet, with creatives injecting lyrics detailing modern anxieties into lively anthems. Mitchy Collins, Jordan Greenwald, and Sam Price are a unique slice of this creative pie, standing strong as lovelytheband. We had a chat with the lovely lads about mental health, learning to work together as creatives, and their brand new single “loneliness for love.”
To start things off, what are the style origins of the name lovelytheband?
We were sitting at a Dave & Busters, going through different names. We had one we liked but realized it was already taken for something else. It may have been a clothing brand or something, I don’t remember, unfortunately. Mitchy threw out the word lovely, we thought it was cool. So we checked if it was taken on Instagram, it was, so we checked if ‘lovelytheband’ was taken. Thankfully, it wasn’t, so we just kinda thought “lovelytheband” as a whole was cool and that was us!
Even with an EP, a debut album, and a whole bunch of shows under your belt, you seem to still be a pretty up and coming band. How would you describe your sound and style to someone who may not have heard of you? What can listeners expect from a lovelytheband song?
This is always a hard question to answer because I think we want people to make that call for themselves. But with that being said we hope people feel accepted and welcomed when they hear our music, our family is growing every day and we’re so thankful to be able to have a community around our band that is very accepting and loving to all.
Some of your tracks tackle pretty heavy things like mental health. How do you go about writing these and putting a pop edge on important topics?
We write about real things that happen in our lives, one of those things is dealing with depression and anxiety, which all of us in the band have dealt with our whole lives. We hope to just open a conversation about mental health; de-stigmatizing mental health and knowing you aren’t alone in those feelings. I’m not sure we intentionally put a “pop edge” on the topic, we just write the music and hope somebody will take something positive away from it.
photo: Bianca Gerasia / pressYou’ve done a lot of touring over the years, from support to festivals to your own headline shows. What’re the best and worst things about touring?
The best thing about touring is the shows for sure. Being able to connect with the fans face to face every night is truly the best. We put so much time and thought into our live show, so genuinely we get so excited to play these songs that we spend hours in the studio perfecting in a live setting. We just did a headline tour overseas and it was amazing to see our music break the language and culture barriers. We went to so many different countries and really one thing stayed the same throughout the whole tour, and that was the music. It was so amazing to see. As far as the worst things, being away from family and friends is hard for us. You miss a lot of things on tour, so when you get back from touring its difficult to fit into normal life as you thought you left it.
Since the start of the year is always a big recap period for everyone, what is the biggest lesson you learned in 2019?
Oh man, we each learned so much this past year. As a band, I think we truly learned how to be a real working machine, creatively especially. We starting writing our second album over the summer of 2019. All 3 of us moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills for 3 months and wrote every day. We moved our studio into the place and just hunkered down. Those few months I think were some of the most transformative times of the band’s life.
Another year-pondering question but a bit less heavy, what were your favorite albums of 2019?
There was so much great music to come out last year. Bon Iver’s i,i. We all saw him on tour, it was one of the best concerts we’ve ever been to. The new Lana Del Rey, Luke Combs, and The 1975 albums were also big ones for us this past year.
Now looking into the future, what can you tell us about your new single “loneliness for love”?
We are so excited for this song to come out. It was actually one of the first ideas that came about right after our first record, in its smallest baby form. It actually took a while for us to work the song out, but we are so happy with how it turned out. We feel its a great intro to lovelytheband 2.0, the song encompasses the past 2 and a half years of touring and living on a bus together, I feel like you can hear the personalities and the chemistry between the 3 of us in the song. We hope you enjoy it, it’s out today!
What else is next for lovelytheband? Are you feeling the sophomore album pressure yet?
Absolutely we are feeling the pressure, it’s terrifying, but we try not to think about it and just do our thing. We are truly in love with this new era of songs, vibe, and the feeling it gives us. We cannot wait to let everyone into the lovelytheband 2.0 era, and it all starts with our new single “loneliness for love.”
Check out the band’s new single “loneliness for love” now available on all streaming platforms.