Mansionair Break Down The Collaborations On ‘Happiness, Guaranteed.’

Strangers

Dom Dolla

Strangers was a really early idea we found when we first started writing for Happiness, Guaranteed. We had written the melody and lyrics but felt we couldn’t totally nail the production. We met Dom in Sydney and after writing a song that day, we showed him the a-cappella we had for the song. He really connected with it and took a pass at producing it. We then met up again and re-tracked all the vocals, building out the harmonies and added the vocoder under it. It was definitely an early favourite when we first wrote it, so we were super stoked we’d found a home for it.

Right Into You

Claptone, Like Mike

In the middle of winter Claptone reached out and asked if we could write and sing on an idea he had. As we were working on it, we’d remembered an early chorus from a song we never finished, I started singing it across Claptone’s beat and it just worked perfectly. We quickly wrote the verse and stacked our usual harmonies on top. It was one of the first tracks we worked on where I wasn’t shy to express how I was feeling. I was pretty caught up in chasing the idea of success at the time, and it was just doing my head in. This was the first track I acknowledged that maybe I wasn’t exactly striving for the right things.

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Empty Promise

Evan White aka Vandelux

We met Evan through the internet and loved his choice of production, his music has so much soul and just felt like such a great fit to collaborate together. We passed around a few early ideas for the song over zoom. It took me a long time to find the right words to write for it, and I found myself rewriting the lyrics over and over again. I had some early sketches for the chorus lyrics, with, “I’m not made of stone / I am just skin and bone…” But the verses weren’t really coming to me. I was going through a big change in my life packing up my home and moving and that evening as I was driving to my new home the sun was setting across the lake. I just felt so overwhelmed with emotion on what was going to happen next. I literally pulled out my phone and turned on my voice recorder and just narrated everything I was seeing and feeling. When I got back to the studio I just refined that voice memo into the lyrics and tracked the final take for the song.

Next High

Kim Tee

We met Kim Tee on the Laneway tour. She’s in Clairo’s touring band and we were always playing before them each stop on the tour. We stayed in contact, always planning to make some music together. She sent us an early sketch of Next High and we loved it. We sent parts back and forth online, trying to keep the essence of the first demo she sent. We wanted something light and uplifting and reconnect to our 'band' roots away from electronic music.

Guillotine

NoMBe

When we started writing for Happiness, Guaranteed. we wrote so many ideas, playing around with different genres and just letting go of any kind of idea of whoMansionairhad been in the past. In doing so - along came the music for Guillotine and we immediately thought of Noah from NoMBe. We’d toured together in the past and the track was just begging for his vocal performance. We literally sent him the tune and he sent back his take, which remained unchanged from his first demo. It was exciting to find so much pace and energy in a song, which we hadn’t really toyed with much inMansionair. The song is an inner dialogue of all life anxieties boiled into one, feeling overwhelmed and needing to detach from the chaos. Noah did such an amazing job at putting into words how we'd been feeling in that moment.