Central Queensland’s indie-country darling Hayley Marsten is releasing her new track ‘Bittersweet At Best’ today: a gorgeous melody of heartache and emotional transition.
Hailing from Central Queensland, country pop artist Hayley Marsten has had a fast trajectory moving audiences around the country with her poignant tales of heartache and rediscovery.
Brandishing her unique style of alt-country and country-pop, Marsten returns with her first piece of new music for 2022 in ‘Bittersweet At Best’. A sublime track wrapped around the emotional landscape of a transitioning relationship moving from happiness to sadness.
With ‘change’ being at the core of her new single, Marsten shares: “Making this song was so easy, I knew from the beginning I wanted the keys to be the main character and we built it from there. My production team are some of the people who know me best and really understood the feeling I wanted this song to give people. We really focused on trying to make it feel as tinged with melancholy as possible. When we added the strings and Melody Moko’s beautiful backing vocals it was just the perfect little golden feeling song to me.”
Recorded at Brisbane’s Hunting Ground Studios, ‘Bittersweet At Best’ itself was initially written back in 2020.
Marsten worked with Cody McWaters (King Stingray, The Chats), Kieran Stevenson, Michael Moko and Dan Sugars – the latter who also worked on ‘Drowning Myself’ – on added production duties. McWaters mixed ‘Bittersweet At Best’, before the final cut was mastered by King Willy Sound (Gotye, Spacey Jane).
Marsten credits the dream team behind ‘Bittersweet At Best’ for added depth and ultimately, elevated the final product to a perfect level.
To coincide with the single release Marsten also revealed an official video. Recorded at Brisbane’s JMC Studios under the direction of Jazmyn Produces, the concept for the video came after ‘Bittersweet At Best’ was completed in the studio. Shot in one take, Marsten admits the pressure was on, but the finished result was very satisfying.
“…The pressure was on to make sure I didn’t stuff up any of the parts and that our wonderful assists and I had choreographed them giving me my guitar at just the right time! I’ve never done a performance only music video, but it felt like the right song for it. I didn’t want it to be boring, so I came up with the most stressful concept for me to execute in one shot.
I’m so proud of how it turned out, even though I only had to mime the playing the instruments, I played them all 90% right! Plus with this song that’s so filled with emotion and melancholy I wanted it to be simple to highlight that.”
‘BITTERSWEET AT BEST’ is out Thursday 22nd September.
My new single ‘Bittersweet at Best’ is out September 22! Full of orchestral strings, golden feelings and melancholy. I’m really proud of this one, pre save here https://t.co/EgEedj7Gmn pic.twitter.com/FdYcvk7nDW
— Hayley Marsten (@hayleymarsten) September 12, 2022
