Charly Bliss on How Friendship, Lexapro, Fatherhood, and More Inspired Their New Album ‘Forever’

The Summer I Turned Pretty

I came across a TikTok you did last year – I think it was Sam – where you’re attempting to rank characters from the series.

Sam Hendricks: Oh, yeah.

Eva Hendricks: It was my first pick, but I did kind of choose it because it’s something we both love so much together.

SH: I got hooked in. I’m always like, you know, older brother, like, “This show, really?” And then she puts one episode on, and I’m like, “Alright, let’s watch another, see what it’s about.” [Eva laughs] And then I’m like, “Can we just finish this in one sitting?”

EH: I guess it kind of started because during the pandemic, I started working on a young adult novel. I started reading a lot of young adult novels because I really wanted to understand the genre better. One of the books that stood out to me as being perfect was The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s a trilogy by Jenny Han. I came to it really late; I’m pretty sure the book came out in the early 2000s. I felt really excited because almost immediately after finishing it, I found out there was going to be a TV series. I was so excited and really ready for that. Overall, what appeals to me about young adult books and TV shows is that they are like a portal to a time I feel very close to, which is a time of huge emotions, big upheaval, and big romance. Everything you’re experiencing sort of for the first time, so it feels extra potent and saturated. That’s something I always try to access as a lyricist. I feel like that’s just how I am. I’m definitely a big feelings person, so that world feels really right to me.

When the TV show came out, it was so good, and it was so fun to experience it with Sam. In my mind, the coming-of-age story is best when the storyline with the teens is as compelling as the storyline with the adults, and I think they did such a good job with that. Sam’s wife said it best – we were talking about why the show is so good, and she was saying that it’s because it makes you feel like that time in your life, when you were a teenager, isn’t that far away. And also, what’s coming for you as an adult isn’t that terrifying; it’s exciting, too, and full of intrigue. I just think it’s a perfect story with lots of drama, which we all love. And great soundtrack.

SH: The soundtrack is great.

What you said about how the adults are depicted reminded me of My So-Called Life, which made me feel the same way.

EH: My favorite show of all time. That’s exactly right. And I think The OC also falls into that category. I love, love, love My So-Called Life. In fact, I almost put it on the list.

What I love about a song like ‘Nineteen’ is that it also taps into both the emotional immensity and the kind of insanity of that time period. I think it’s normal to cringe at that version of ourselves looking back, and I wonder if engaging with these books or shows helps you empathize with it in a way that’s validating or conducive to writing.

EH: Definitely. I feel like I’m cringe and proud all the way through. [laughs] I used to feel like, “Oh my god, that was such a bad part of my past. It was so fraught.” And as much as going through it was torture, I also kind of feel like at this point, just because of how I am, having read all these types of books about tortured romance, I was always going to go out and find that in the world for myself. Overall, I just feel a lot of love and affection for that time in my life I was always going to go out and have a relationship like that, where it was awful, it was crazy, I never knew where I stood or what was happening. It was ridiculous, but I’m glad that I let myself mine the depths of what my emotions were capable of. And what’s even more wonderful about that is knowing you don’t have to live it again – living it once was enough. [laughs] And I’m so happy that I didn’t continue to pursue relationships like that. But I can revisit it through writing with the band, through writing for myself, reading these books, and watching these TV shows. I can go back there and think, “I remember what that felt like. I’ve lived that, and I’m so glad it’s over. But God, wasn’t that wild?”

HAIM

I remembered you picked Something to Tell You for Amoeba’s What’s in My Bag? series a few years ago. What keeps inspiring you about the band?

EH: Well, first of all, sibling band. Love that. Whenever I talk about the making of this record, I think about a feeling we were trying to capture amongst the four of us. Above anything else, it was so important to us to regain a sense of playfulness around making music and make a record that felt like a world. I think HAIM is a band that does that so well. They make records you just want to listen to all the way through. They bring so much fun and playfulness, and in their music videos there’s so much of that. You can almost hear on the record how close they are – obviously, that’s in part because they’re siblings, but also, band dynamics are complicated. What I hoped we would be able to achieve on this record is that anyone could listen to it – knowing as much or as little about our band – and hear the connection between the four of us, how much we were all on the same page, how much we were all just enjoying making music with each other, especially after however many years apart. HAIM do such a great job of that. Whenever we were stuck in the studio, we would revisit one of their songs and be like, “Okay, yes, it should feel like that.” It wasn’t even about how things sounded; it was more so a feeling that’s hard to communicate – of connection, ease, fun, and playfulness – that I think they achieve really well.

SH: Even from just a production standpoint, they are a pop band, but they are so uniquely them. They do such a good job of carving out their own niche in the pop world. We know that people have struggled to place our band – I mean, they’re probably going to struggle more than ever. [laughs] But just embracing what’s unique about us, like they embrace what’s unique about them, and treating that as a strength, not something that’s like, “Why can’t people understand?”

EV: That’s such a great point, because I also think they’re a tough-to-classify band. They’re working instrumentally in the same way that we are, but those albums, I would absolutely call them pop albums through and through. So that was also a guiding light for us in the studio whenever we were getting a little bit lost.

Friendship

Every time I listen to Forever, I hear what you’re saying, that even though it often revolves around tumultuous relationships, the friendship you share is always either in the backdrop or at the heart of these songs. Given some of the changes you went through while making the album, did you sense that friendship was always going to be a constant, that it would come through in this way?

EH: No way. For a long time, I felt like the most interesting thing about me and my experience only came down to my romantic relationships. But when I look back on it, the themes that are reoccurring on the album – of course, there’s plenty about romantic love, but there’s also so much on this album about friendship. So much of my experience over the last five years – with accidentally moving to Australia and being separated from my bandmates – was twofold for me. Coming out of touring our second album, Young Enough, the four of us were constantly together. I think we were on tour nine, ten months out of that year. It was really intense, and in some ways, we were due for a little time apart, but I could never have anticipated how much time – like, I thought were due for maybe a few weeks off, but it ended up being a year and a half that I didn’t see my bandmates. It was really overwhelming. I remember being in Australia, watching videos of us on tour, and wondering if I would ever get to do that again. Even just looking at how close I was on stage to each of my bandmates, I was like, “I would give anything to be in a room standing that close to them.” Something as basic as that. I missed them so much.

In terms of our band, it really shifted my perspective on our relationships. Like, Oh my god, these are the most important people in my life. No romantic relationship I’ve had, as someone who was prioritizing romantic relationships, has even come close to the length of the constant that our band has been for me in my life. I missed it – of course, I missed them, but it was also this realization that my biggest dream had come true. I get to tour the world with my brother and two of my best friends, and I had totally gotten caught up in things that don’t really matter, like how stressed I was, is the album doing well, are we were doing well. I missed the most important stuff because I was focused on the wrong things. A lot of the record, I think, comes from that feeling.

Simultaneously, I was also in a new country, on a new continent, in a place where I truly knew only one person in the entire country. It was sort of my first time as an adult having to make new friends and build a community. A song like ‘In Your Bed’ is about having a new friend in your life who suddenly makes the world make more sense because they’re part of your life. I was really thinking about this other part of my life for the first time. I was so happy in my romantic relationship, which was also a big part of what was going on in my life at the time, that I had the freedom to look at this other part of my life that I’d been neglecting. Because my romantic life felt really stable, it opened up my ability to be more invested in my friendships and feel so much gratitude for the other people in my life.

You mentioned before that band dynamics are complicated, and I think there’s something special about maintaining a friendship with your sibling. Do you mind sharing one thing that you feel makes the other person a good friend?

EH: Oh my God, you’re going to make me cry! I think Sam has a really special ability to make other people shine. Whenever I bring anything to Sam – first of all, he’s the most talented person I know, and so, when we started this band, it was so intimidating to show my older brother music that I had been writing. But then, I think what he brings to everything is so much belief in other people. He has been such a great supporter of me and my musical abilities, even though he’s definitely more classically trained as a musician. I feel like he’s never made me feel stupid, dumb, or wrong for any of the things I don’t know. He just takes what I bring to him and makes it so much better. I think that has created such a safe, patient space between us as writers, because he’s a writer as well, and I hope I bring the same to him.

SH: You do.

EV: Ahh, thanks! [laughs]

SH: I would say, among many other things, I know Eva always has my back, no matter what. She’ll hear me out if there’s anything I’m feeling funny or weird about. She always makes it a top priority to remedy that, to make sure that I and everyone else in the band feels good about what we’re doing. With this album, as you’ve been talking about, we really prioritized all of our mental health and how we feel about everything. We wanted to make sure we all felt good because, in previous album cycles, there were things that were stewing under the surface that we didn’t talk about. Only after talking about them did we realize, like, “We can’t control how people receive our work, but we can control how our band operates and how we communicate with each other.” I just always know Eva will hear me and make it a top priority to make sure that I’m feeling good.

EH: Aw, I love you.

SH: Me too.

Eva’s car

I read that you started tracking demos on your phone while sitting in a parked rental car. What made it a good place to sit and record?

EH: When I went to Australia, the idea was always like, “I’m going to go to Australia for six weeks and I’m going to work on writing.” That was going to be my priority. But I was staying with this new guy in my life at the time, and he had roommates, so I felt really embarrassed about trying to write at the house. The only place I had where I could be totally alone was my car, so I would just drive to a different location every day and record and work on songs. Then, I ended up being there way longer than I thought it was going to be, so I had to return the rental car and started recording in the back of my boyfriend’s car, and then I finally bought my own car. Then I finally bought my own car, and I hadn’t owned one since I was a teenager. My favorite thing about having a car was always, you know, you’re on the road with other people and can sing really loud and be in your own little world out in public, which is the dream. I sort of fell back in love with singing through having a car because it offered me the privacy to enjoy singing, both our songs – when I was stuck lyrically, I would just drive until I figured it out – but also just singing along to other people’s songs.

Whenever anyone has asked us, “How do you hope people will hear this album?” we’ve always said across all records, the dream is that it would be in a car, with all the windows down, screaming along. I hadn’t actually had that experience in a really long time, so to be back in this place where I had my own private space, I had my own car, and I could just drive around – and especially where I live in Australia, I was driving through these gorgeous rainforests, mountain ranges, cane fields, this epic landscape while working on our album – it really brought me back to this playful approach to making music. And I know you’re a big radio fan, Sam.

SH: I mean, not anymore.

EH: But you were in the car all the time.

SH: I was in the car all the time. Listening to the radio was interesting. For a while, I loved it, and I was hearing a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard before, and I was like, “That’s cool.” But then you start to realize, at least with American radio, they just play the same things over and over again.

I love that the album starts with ‘Tragic’ and that line, “Once you let me drive the car, you know I’m gonna crash it.” It’s classic pop recklessness.

EH: Thank you. We’re actually coming up with merch right now for the tour, and we were like, “Oh, we should make a bumper sticker.” And Dan had the idea to put that line on a bumper sticker. But I was like, “I don’t know, maybe that’s taking it too far.” [laughs] No one wants to drive behind the person with that bumper sticker.

Lexapro

EH: I guess I would include all SSRIs under that, but for me specifically, I’m on Lexapro. Mental health has always been at the center of what a lot of Charlie Bliss songs are about or themed around, and I’ve really struggled with my mental health. I’d say overall, this has been an extremely happy period of my life, and it’s almost more illuminating about the state of your mental health when you are really happy, because there’s this fantasy that if only everything were going right, I wouldn’t feel these feelings. I’ve thought that at times in my life – maybe my anxiety is situational, maybe my depression is situational. But then I find myself saying many times, “I’m doing everything right, why don’t I feel better?” You know, I exercise a lot, I was living in – still live in – this tropical paradise, I’m really enjoying my life. Why do I still feel anxious and depressed? Why can’t I be enjoying my life more?

I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself with my mental health, thinking, “I can solve it, I can fix it on my own. If only I did this or that, it would get better.” But I hit a real low point a few years into making this record with my mental health, and I had to acknowledge that you can do everything “right,” whatever that means, and still really struggle. I remember one of my first therapists, one of the first people I ever really talked to about mental health, said to me as a teenager – because I was feeling so much frustration with myself, like, Why do I feel this way, I don’t want to feel this way, I just want to be normal – he said something like, “If you had diabetes, would you hate yourself for taking insulin? Would you hate yourself for needing to do things to take care of yourself?” It’s the same thing.

I had really resisted taking medication for my mental health, but then, honestly, Spencer and Sam started, and a few other people I was really close to. I was really scared about starting it and what it would mean. Does that mean I’m giving up? Does that mean I’m not… But then I did it because I felt like I had to. And, oh my god, it was like this huge moment of self-forgiveness. Like, “Oh, this isn’t my fault.” The things I struggle with are not my fault, it’s not a personal failing. It’s literally chemicals in my brain, and it was so freeing to feel this ease in my life that I had never felt before. And I still do all the things that also help – exercise, therapy, meditation, all of that – but it was such a huge relief to finally have that help and feel like I could keep my head above water and not have to work so hard at it all the time. It was such a positive development in my life, and it had always been framed to me as, “If you do this, you’re giving up.” But it turned out to be a wonderful change, and I’m so grateful to all the people in my life who were honest with me about the reality of what it was like for them, instead of this thing I had built up in my head as a bad thing. Do you want to say anything about your experience?

SH: Yeah, I mean, I was also very scared and hesitant. Spencer was the one for me who made me realize this isn’t something bad. It’s like everything Eva said: there’s nothing wrong with me. I have this mental illness, it runs in our family, and why wouldn’t I treat it? Why would I want to spend the rest of my life just struggling through it without helping myself? But I think, more than anything, it was the acknowledgment of, “Okay, I do I have chronic depression and anxiety.” That acceptance was such a huge, freeing thing. I think we all really prioritize our mental health as a collective unit, but also as individuals. For this record, the pandemic was so weird because it killed a lot of the momentum we had at the time, but if that didn’t happen, if we didn’t get this long break, I don’t know if I personally would have taken the time to address my own things. I don’t know as a group what we would have done. It’s complicated, but at the forefront of everything, we just want to feel good. If we feel good as a band and as individuals, then we’ll keep doing this.

I think we were putting so much weight on like, “How are people gonna perceive this? If they don’t like it, what do we do?” And now it’s like, “You know what, we worked really hard on this. We’re so proud of it. We’re so happy with it. I’m at peace.” No matter how it’s received – and this has not been true for other releases – it’s not going to affect my feelings about it and my feelings around the making of it. It’s a really refreshing feeling. It’s nice to just be like, “Whatever happens, happens.”

EH: And that’s hard-won. All of the work we did on ourselves is part of the product we created, and it’s also the process around it, what we worked on in ourselves. I remember Sam used to say to me all the time when we were making Young Enough: “This is supposed to be fun.” I feel like we were banging our heads against the wall, like, “Why isn’t it fun?” And so much of it was our attitude towards things, but also, exactly like you were just saying, we weren’t looking after ourselves. Our ability to make this record and make the album we wanted to make is so linked to our ability to look after ourselves and really address what we were talking about. There’s so much about this album taking forever to come out that was brutal, but I also think it couldn’t have happened any other way.

Fatherhood

Before talking about fatherhood more broadly, it’s funny to me that it’s referenced directly in ‘I Don’t Know Anything’ [“Sam has a kid and he’s setting the date”]. Sam, I’m curious how you felt about that line initially.

SH: I mean, I’m used to certain lines getting in there that are, not even about me specifically, but just like, “Oh yeah, I know what she’s talking about here.” [laughs] Direct, you know what I mean? So when she wrote it, I was like, “Yeah, cool.” We talked about – she might have to update it because Sam has two kids now. But I would never want to limit anything Eva can say.

EH: It was such a huge moment. When we found out you and Kate were going to have a kid, it was such a shift in what was happening. It was like, “Oh, shit, we’re grown-ups now.”

How quickly did that settle in for you, Sam, the way it might change things? And how did you experience those shifts?

SH: I’m the type of person where I tend to overthink really unimportant things in my life, and then I tend to just wing it with major decisions. [Eva laughs] I don’t know why that is, but that’s something I know about myself. As far as fatherhood affecting my life and the band and everything – how it affects my life, obviously, doesn’t need to be stated. It’s a huge change. My daughter was born in February 2020, just a month before the big lockdown happened in the United States, and it was the most difficult time in my life, emotionally, by far. One of the reasons is because, with parenthood, I was kind of like, “I’ve always wanted this, I’ll figure it out.” But I was so emotionally unprepared for that change – and I don’t think there’s anything you can really do to prepare, in hindsight. It was definitely a time of big feelings, and a lot of those big feelings were extremely hard – some very dark times. Which kind of gets multiplied when you’re feeling like, “Wait a minute, I’ve always wanted this, and now I have it, and I’m feeling this really dark feeling, and now I’m feeling guilty for feeling that way.” It’s just a multiplier. It took me a really long time to work through it, and thank god I have such a supportive partner, because she did everything she could to get me feeling better.

As far as songwriting goes, I don’t write lyrics, but so many of these songs were written or started around that time. Some of the songs with the biggest emotional impact, like ‘Nineteen’, that was in 2020. I am incapable of writing a song that doesn’t evoke big feelings, I don’t know why. I think because I was feeling so many strong things, it came out in the songwriting. I haven’t been the best at letting those feelings out, and I think maybe they were coming out in songs, unintentionally. It’s hard to say.

EH: You’re blowing my mind right now.

SH: I was having song ideas every single night when I was in this really dark time. Sorry, I’m kind of speaking on the fly because I haven’t really thought about it that much until now.

EH: You’re so right. I’ve never even related the fact that, damn, we are really similar. I’m doing big feelings lyrically, and you’re doing big feelings musically. For me, it’s like, I’m waking up in the middle of the night like, “I just had a lyrical idea, I have to get this down.” You’re waking up in the middle of the night like, “I just had an idea for a chord progression” or whatever. That is so epic.

SH: I’ve never paid much attention to lyrics; some of my favorite songs, ones I’ve listened to ten thousand times, I don’t know the lyrics to. For me, it’s more about what I was feeling when I first heard it or when I listen to it during a major life experience. It attaches to that, and then the song means something to me that’s maybe not even close to what the lyrics are about. A song like ‘Nineteen’ is the perfect example of pouring emotion into a song without putting a word down on paper. That song is such an emotional release.

EH: That was beautiful, Sam. You really blew my mind.

You’ve never talked about this? The similarity in how you emotionally approach songwriting?

EH: No! [laughs]

SH: No, not really.

EV: It’s changing my life.

SH: It’s weird, because I never sit down and am like, “I’m going to write a song. Let’s think of something. Oh, this chord progression’s cool.” It always comes from somewhere. An idea comes, and then it’s like, “Let’s roll with it.” I don’t tend to overthink it, but now, reflecting back, I’m like, “Well, why did I have so many song ideas during that time in my life?” It’s definitely connected. I didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to, except for my wife, and I felt so bad that I was feeling so bad, I didn’t want to keep dumping that on her. And because I was so isolated, literally, and everyone was so isolated during the pandemic, I felt like I had no one to talk to. I didn’t want to talk to other dads because I felt like they would be like, “I didn’t feel that. What are you talking about?” And it would just make me feel worse. So, I’m sure that it was a way of releasing some emotion, subconsciously.

Seeing Paramore at Madison Square Garden

EV: This one’s easy. [laughs]

SH: Yeah, ending on a fun note. All of us in the band want to take this thing as far as it can go. We want big songs, big shows, big everything, and seeing them – God, they have so many unbelievable songs, and the stage production was just so insane. It was like, “Damn, let’s write songs that fit in a setting like this.”

EV: When we saw them at MSG, I wasn’t even supposed to be at the show. Sam’s wife was supposed to go with him, but she’s a doula, and she got called into a birth, I think.

SH: Yeah.

EV: So I ended up going with him, and I literally didn’t find out I was going until maybe an hour before the show. It was just this incredible night at this iconic venue in New York.

SH: It was like, “This is what we aspire to right here. This is it.” I have so much respect for them because they started as one thing, and now they’re another thing. I feel like people didn’t take them seriously at first, like, “Oh, it’s an emo band.” But I loved them from the start, and I’m so happy to see that they’re getting the respect they deserve because they’re one of the best bands, in my opinion, of the past however many years. As a band that has always felt like we don’t know where we fit in, it’s really inspiring to see them just do what they’re excited about and see people respond positively to it. I know every band experiences it, but there are people who have heard the singles so far and are like, “Oh, I miss the guitars.” And I’m like, “First of all, there are guitars. I don’t know what you’re hearing, because there are guitars everywhere on this record.” [Eva laughs] But we’re not trying to do something that feels inauthentic to us. We’re doing literally the opposite. We’re doing exactly what we’re excited about. Do we hope people love it and are along for the ride? Absolutely. And if not, our other records will always be there for you.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Charly Bliss’ Forever is out now via Lucky Number.