When Blake Hazard has the pigtails in her hair - which is frequently, or was frequently - we see the Submarines front woman as being partial to the kind of love that's easy to fall for. It's the kind that fools rush in to because they know no better. They're overcome with the moment and the person, the lightness of the air and the mint of a lip-gloss. It could be almost anything that allows the sweet innocence of a hand touching a shoulder blade from behind or accidentally grazing a knee to set off some beautiful inner turmoil. Hazard, the better half of her husband, bandmate and songwriting partner John Dragonetti, leads us to believe that she's a sucker for the variety of love that gets written into all kinds of novels and motion pictures, supposedly depicting the fantasy. She might be partial to it, but it doesn't mean that she trusts it and it certainly doesn't mean that she's not skeptical of it. You hear it all over the group's two full-length albums. There is a hesitancy to grow too excited about where this all may be leading (even if we know that she's no longer speaking from the current experience of being luckless in love) as there have been too many derailments in the past to know better.
The Submarines do perpetually have their fingers crossed that things are going to work out in the end. They'd be betting on the wrong side if they were to do otherwise and they feel that sentiment as strongly as they feel everything. What good could come from hoping for the negative fall? Why shouldn't happiness prevail against the odds? It might make for less dramatic drama, but it could make for a happy ending and that seems to be the ultimate goal for the folks that pop in and out of the band's latest, "Love Notes/Letter Bombs," an album that speaks to those parts of us that want to see the meek inherit the earth and the parts of all of us that we either admit to or don't that would rather watch a sad romantic movie than anything else, most of the time. It speaks to the parts of us that truly feel like the only thing that's going to matter to us on our deathbeds is that we found that one person that makes us feel like we're standing in the basket of a magnificent hot air balloon, coasting or gliding above the ground on a spotless day and they let us love them for as long as we could mutually do so. It could be that this took us to the ends of our lives or it could be that the plug was pulled prematurely, but it's likely that that was all that mattered because you see, sparks may fly and they may fly right. It's what we hope for. We hold out for that. We pray for it. You can't wait to find that person that you just want to hold onto tighter. You want to see them every second of every day and it feels miraculous to fall face-first into that kind of love. Hazard sings songs that make love feel like stardust and like splatting against a concrete sidewalk. It all feels brutally amazing either way, as it comes and it goes.