Within the course of 10 months, everything turned topsy-turvy for the Happy Fits. By the beginning of 2024, founding member Ross Monteith left the band in the middle of their headlining tour, and two new members joined—guitarists and singers Nico Rose and Raina Mullen. That year, drummer Luke Davis temporarily parted ways with the band to enter rehab, while frontman Calvin Hangman also left from a “toxic” relationship, moved to Brooklyn, New York, then back to Pennsylvania to Philadelphia and found love again.
Big life transitions, love and loss, then finding everything again inspired the band’s fourth album, Lovesick.
“It feels like a whole new beginning,” said singer and cellist Calvin Langman. “We had to go through a lot of struggle to get here, but the band is stronger and healthier than ever before now, and I couldn’t be more excited about the chapter we’re about to embark on.”
Arriving three years after the band’s Under the Shade of Green, the Happy Fits don’t put up any fronts on Lovesick, 15 songs about breaking hearts, lust, and the choatic moments in between, from the opening calm before the storm “Do You See Me?” before smacking into one of their revved up anthems “Everything You Do” and “Cruel Power,” a song Langman said was about “knowingly putting yourself in a situation that’s bad for your heart”—Get outta my head / Well it’s such a cruel power / Keep inviting me back to your place / Oh I’m gonna break one of these days.
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On the title track, Mullen and Rose come front and center on lead vocals slippping through I get so love drunk on myself / Why should I want somebody else? / Now Cupid’s scamming in my head / He’s such a creep, I need him dead. There’s a love song for every ocassion, all the ups and downs, on Lovesick with The Nerve,” “Shake Me” and “Blackhole” punching through some of the melancholy. A feminine touch flushes over “Miss You” and adds a new dynamic to the foursome’s harmonies through the post-punk synth “I Still Think I Love You” and “Wild in Love” and more wistful ballads “I Could Stare at You for Hours” and “Superior,” and through the charging end of “I Remember.”
Now on a 50-date tour through Decemebr 2025, Langman spoke to American Songwriter about no longer feeling lovesick and unexpectedly entering at the band’s “Fleetwood Mac” era.
American Songwriter: Lovesick came out of such a whirlwind period for the band. How did the songs help you all move through these life transitions?
Calvin Langman: These were all brought to the table in the last two years when we had two major changes. The original guitarist of the band left and we have two new guitarists in the band, Raina and Nico, who are vocalists as well. I also got out of a relationship that was seven years long. From [age] 18 to 25, it was the only thing I knew, so being single again in my mid-20s was really new to me, and I was rediscovering what it was like to fall in love and trying to put myself out there, and getting rejected. It was really inspiring, just like the songs I grew up on, like the Beatles … really great classic love songs with really catchy melodies. That’s what inspired me to start writing when I was young. I felt that resurgence again, that return to form of “Oh, this is what I really do love writing about.” With Under the Shade of Green, everyone had their pandemic album, writing about the struggles we all went through during that time, but this album is more internal, from my personal experiences.
AS: There’s every wave of emotion of love from the ballads to the bigger rock energy, and this new dynamic with Raina and Nico singing.
CL: Writing and thinking about the arrangements on the record, we’re already dealing with the whole new orchestration, for everything, and being able to do four-part harmonies with females and two males, which instantly brought up some Fleetwood Mac possibilities, or the Mamas and Papas, and we were really excited to explore that. In “Miss You,” Raina starts the song, and Nicole takes over in the pre-chorus. Raina has a beautiful, Haley Williams-like soprano, and Nico has a grittier Joan Jett vibe, so it’s really fun in the production process to see whose voice—and Luke’s too—comes through. Now we have four different instruments that affect what the listener is going to experience.
AS: Did Lovesick” kick off the album?
CL: There’s a song called ‘The Nerve” and the main hook of that song is Baby, I’m a piece of s—t / I got what I deserve. And there’s always going to be that feeling of “I did a horrible thing,” but it’s a song about living through the guilt because it’s something that you did; and two, trying to justify why it happened; and three, giving it space and see how you can grow from that.
AS: Did the album serve your own personal therapy session?
CL: It definitely was. I can only write what I’ve experienced. I love that vulnerability, because if you’re not going to put it in your music, I don’t know where else you can put it. I love exploring those other aspects of being a human that aren’t talked about much.
AS: These songs are definitely bigger, more anthemic, and cinematic. Was that something you wanted to get through on the album?
CL: This is the first record that I was co-producing, along with our manager and producer of our last three records, Ayad Al Adhamy. He’s been my mentor in terms of music, production and arranging, and songwriting. The foundation of it was the bass and the drums, and the guitars. We had a recording studio in Woodstock, New York [Applehead Recording] which is a beautiful, renovated barn, and the idea was to capture an arena rock sound, so it would sound close to what it’s going to sound like live.
We really tried to preserve a lot of the early reflections that you hear in the music, so that when people see it live, I hope it translates better there. And that’s something I wanted to keep in mind, because I want to sound on the record the way we sound live, too.
AS: There is a larger, more cinematic sound to this album, particularly on some of the ballads.
CL: “Superior” was one song that wasn’t even on the recording schedule, but when we got there, I was so inspired by being around all that nature in Woodstock, and it brought me back to Lake Superior, where my ex and I would go almost every summer. And it definitely brought that song out of me. The band took a big liking to it, and we’re all happy we ended up doing it because it gives the record a deeper emotional level, as well as a very different sound. It’s the first 12/8 ballad that we’ve ever done.
AS: It sounds like there are a lot of firsts on this album.
CL: There definitely are. And that’s something that we strive for, to keep our music feeling fresh. We’re three records and an EP deep. So I think there’s the expectation of “What are they going to do differently?” With Nico and Raina’s vocals it is like releasing our first record at the same time. With “Lovesick,” I was singing the beginning of it [“Lovesick” the song] for a long time, and something wasn’t hitting. Then, Raina just started singing it, and we were all just frozen. We’re like, “Your voice belongs here. This is how it’s supposed to be.
AS: Speaking of “Lovesick,” why did it end up as the album title?
CL: I imagine someone listening to this record and saying, “I can go without listening to a love song for a long time,” but I do like the fact that it is called Lovesick. There’s no actual song about being the heartbroken one, which I feel like we have hit on some of our older material. Now it’s about the lust, the desperation, the fun of it all, and the other side, the darker side.
AS: The band released its debut Concentrate nearly a decade ago in 2018. How has songwriting shifted for you within this time?
CL: I always try to keep true to the songwriter’s mantra of write what you know. When I look back on the body of work of the Happy Fits, it’s essentially a diary of my life. The early records are a coming of age, losing your innocence, and yearning for independence and freedom. But this record looked at angles I hadn’t written about before. Leaving that seven-year relationship was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I feel like there’s always that perspective of the person who is heartbroken, and not necessarily the perspective of the heartbreaker. It’s not anything that I wanted to glorify, but rather explore those feelings that aren’t really talked about a lot, like what it means to break someone’s heart. There was a lot of searching for why I did it, and living with the guilt of hurting someone that you really loved and knew super well. There was a lot of unexplored territory there that I thought was not just interesting to write about, but the most present feeling in my life.
Lovesick felt like a resurgence of the songs I love to write. It made me want to explore more avenues of what I haven’t talked about. When you’re growing up, love is such a broad term that everyone has their own definition for it. And as we go through life, the meaning changes for people, and it’s constantly changing and evolving for me, too, so I am a big fan of trying to figure out the little nuances of what it could mean. When I was younger, there was that idealization of it as this perfect, magical thing. But as I’ve gotten older, I learned it’s actually a lot of work, and it’s truly imperfect. But that’s what makes it so special. If you work through it, then you can really get to something beautiful.
Photos: Anna Koblish
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