Ian Glass
Audio By Carbonatix
To Denver musician Carolyn Hunter, the hardest part of love is also the most worthwhile: It’s all the work that goes into the day-to-day living after a relationship begins and before happily ever after.
But it took Hunter a number of years to reach that understanding. When the 34-year-old singer started writing her new single, “Hardest Part,” in 2018, she was at the beginning of a soul-searching period where she transformed her music, separated from her longtime partner, and then reunited with him and married him.
“Hardest Part,” which releases on all major streaming platforms Friday, March 11, has changed in tandem with Hunter herself. Although it was the first song she wrote from a collection of tunes that became her 2021 album Lovelight, the synth-pop number ultimately morphed into a standalone single.
“It became an outlier tune that deserved to shine on its own,” Hunter says.
Initially, the song was an outlet for Hunter’s imagination. She felt stagnant in her relationship, and she had began fantasizing about being with someone else, which she alludes to in her lyrics, “I don’t know you / But I know / I know you’re going to break my heart.”
“I was feeling this desire for change and newness and chaos and drama and variation,” she says.
But it wasn’t just romantic change that Hunter was craving. The singer, who co-founded Colorado indie-folk band the Heartstring Hunters after graduating from UCLA in 2009, had been performing within the folk genre for almost a decade. She began to feel disconnected from her authentic voice, and felt that she was conforming to the music scene rather than staking out what she truly wanted to create.
Around that same time, she found Maggie Rogers’s music and discovered that the pop sound was exactly the music she had been dreaming of. It wasn’t just sonically appealing; in the wake of the #metoo movement, Hunter saw a format that could allow her “to be wild and sing about sex and not feel shamed for it,” she says.
Hunter went from folk to indie pop.
Ian Glass
When the Heartstring Hunters broke up and Hunter and her partner separated, she started turning her melodies into pop renditions. Once she began collaborating with producer Julian Peterson of Wolf Den Records, she found an outlet for creative growth. “I call him a music therapist producer,” Hunter adds. “It was more than just producing – the listening and hearing part of the process was very healing.”
Hunter and Peterson were joined by drummer, producer and mixer Micah Tawlks of Peptalk Studio and even Rogers’s bassist, Brian Kesley, to create Lovelight, but the format of “Hardest Part” remained elusive. However, by the time they approached it again in July 2021, Hunter found that she wasn’t as attached to the lyrics and structure. “I had less need to control the song,” she says, which allowed for “a more playful, unique touch.”
Hunter and her collaborators chopped the chorus in half, left lyrics unrhymed and allowed the words to remain abstract. That process, Hunter says, “etherealized the words and added to the lust and desire” of the single.
“Hardest Part” is filled with ambient synth tones, Hunter’s dreamy voice, funky rhythms and reverb-lingering guitar. It keeps coming back to a chorus of “The middle is the hardest part” without leaving the impression that the hardest part is difficult at all.
After taking time and space to better understand herself, Hunter says that she now sees “the middle” time with her husband as space for living, breathing, loving and being – for “sharing meals and thoughts and a sustained love that I could never see with anyone else,” she says. “It’s so easy to destroy shit, but to sustain something and maintain it is super hard.”
Though Hunter’s perspective has changed over the years, “Hardest Part” still toys with the idea of sinking into imagination. That can be a tool for creativity, she says, but it can also be limiting when you don’t control it. In life, she’s been working to root herself in the present, but in her songs, she still seeks unfettered freedom.
“Hardest Part” will be available on all streaming platforms on Friday, March 11. For more on Carolyn Hunter and her upcoming shows and music, visit her website, carolynhunter.com, or her Instagram.
