Har Mar Superstar’s latest album, Best Summer Ever, doesn’t always have the fun vibes one would expect given the title. Listen to “How Did I Get Through the Day,” a ballad that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on AM radio 60 years ago, for example. “I’m all alone, watching the phone,” sings Sean Tillman, who performs under the name Har Mar Superstar. “But you ain’t coming home.”
The song’s longing feels perfectly at home on Best Summer Ever. Many of the tracks focus on departures and yearning, such as closing track “Confidence” and the synthesizer-driven version of Bobby Charles’ “I Hope.”
Yet maybe these songs aren’t in conflict with the album’s title. Summertime is fleeting, as is the youth with which summer fun is most commonly associated.
Tillman explained the name of the sixth Har Mar Superstar record, which was released last month, in a phone interview ahead of his May 15 appearance at Daytrotter’s Davenport venue. “It’s something I say when people ask me to take photos with a group of friends, or if people are toasting,” he said. “No matter what time of year, I always say, ‘Best summer ever.’”
There’s more to the title than just being a goofy refrain Tillman uses with friends: “Since the album’s also kind of melancholy at a lot of points, I think that it’s got a nice kind of haunting, weird, sad vibe as well.”
Those vibes emanate from the whole record, even in more-upbeat songs such as “Famous Last Words,” one of the highlights of the album. Pockets of foreboding, ugly distortion hang over the power-pop track, accentuating the vague references to leaving and dying and begging Mama not to cry. In the commentary-track edition of Best Summer Ever on Spotify, Tillman notes that the lyrics are actually the famous last words of well-known figures such as Truman Capote.
The undercurrent of sadness doesn’t overwhelm the fun energy driving this record, though. The melancholy is mixed with the fun, dance-floor-ready tracks such as the Julian Casablancas-penned “Youth Without Love” or “Haircut,” a track co-written with Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ frontwoman Karen O. Another of the great dance songs on the album is “It Was Only Dancing (Sex),” which Vice’s music blog Noisey praised for Tillman’s voice, “supple like a 17-year old’s thigh.”
Tillman called the album a sort of fictitious greatest-hits record spanning 1950 to 1985. This stylistic jumping around from decade to decade keeps the album interesting throughout.
But the idea to produce the album that way didn’t occur to Tillman until he was fairly far along in the process of its creation. “Once we started producing, I thought that’d be a fun way to kind of encapsulate all of the songs, capture each one’s style, kind of not be stuck in one sorta like zone as far as mixing and finishing out all the instrumentation,” he said.
Best Summer Ever is a stylistic departure from his previous record, the soul album Bye Bye 17, but the process of writing was similar. “I think I wrote both of them kind of the same way, mainly just on a guitar, kind of getting weird by myself,” Tillman said.
Har Mar Superstar will be ending its North American tour at Daytrotter, and audiences who saw Tillman perform on Halloween 2014 at Codfish Hollow Barn can expect a different experience at the upcoming show. His band at Codfish Hollow featured standard rock instrumentation, but this time around Tillman will be performing with a seven-person band, complete with horns. Tillman assures that the Quad Cities can “expect a really fun, good-ass time.”
Har Mar Superstar will perform on Sunday, May 15, at Daytrotter (324 Brady Street, Davenport; Daytrotter.com). The 8 p.m. show also features Solid Gold, and tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.
For more information on Har Mar Superstar, visit HarMarSuperstar.com.
Hannah Bates is a recent St. Ambrose University graduate who likes music more than she likes most other things. She can be reached at bateshannaha@gmail.com.
