Smaller Hearts channel big Postal Service vibes on their latest single, “Double Space.” If anything, the Dartmouth-based electro-pop duo have found themselves in a time when bunny suits are all the more necessary for a music video. And yet, Smaller Hearts finds it in themselves to channel something a little more optimistic for “Double Space.”
“We love sad songs, and that usually shows in our songwriting, but something about the long, weird summer of 2020 made us want to try our hand at being a bit more optimistic,” says the husband and wife musical duo of Ron Bates and Kristina Parlee. “These times are scary and strange, but when a hopeful thought entered our minds, we thought we’d try to run with it. Maybe we needed a break from our own pessimism.”
While the song goes heavy on the beat, recording much of the track in Dartmouth, the lyrics—composed and recorded on a beautiful August afternoon in Cape Breton, while watching cormorants dive in St. Anns Bay—get gently tucked away under the melodic drone.
It’s a little bit of a carpe diem, a moment in which the band indulges in the idea that we might make up for all the lost time. “Double Space” isn’t a call to keep twelve feet apart, but to fill the void with as much life as possible. That might even be interpreted literally if the plan involves escaping the planet.
“The title ‘Double Space’ is almost an instruction: let’s be bigger; let’s be uninhibited; let’s double space,” say Bates and Parlee. “It’s about meeting challenges head-on, a song about being brave. Almost a rebuke to 2020, or a challenge to ourselves to rise above the bad vibes of the time, even if only for the duration of a pop song. There’ll be time to come back to earth later.”