“There are anchors and balloons, tell me which one are you?”
This was the first lyric to spring from Mark Haugen’s latest album cycle. Releasing “Anchors and Balloons” as the lead single of Maybe Next Year was a thoughtful choice; the song’s lyrics tease the world of the full work. The project is anchored, so to speak, by hefty lyrical themes of self-doubt and uncertainty. Meanwhile, there are hopeful balloons taking flight throughout. Somehow this music is both dark and… aspirational? Heck, the first three songs all invoke images of travel and transience.
As it happens, Mark underwent something of a circuitous journey (Des Moines by way of Lincoln by way of Des Moines) over the course of about 10 years, before the tunes came to fruition. “It took moving back to Des Moines a decade later and connecting with the right people to get the songs finished… [I]t’s an album with Iowa bookends,” said Haugen. Ping-ponging between cities may be another influence on Maybe Next Year themes of uncertainty, consciously or otherwise.
Songs like “Under the Pressure” or “Be Kinder to Yourself” conjure ’00s piano pop from Ben Folds or Regina Spektor, just with an extra twist. Imagine if Spektor’s more twee, cutesy leanings were carefully redrafted with the naked honesty of Daniel Johnston or Elliott Smith. My personal favorite is “Your Dreams Got Smaller.” The title says it all, but its melody has this undulating, searching quality about it. Two simple notes quaver delicately, on and on, before the phrase finally resolves and repeats. It’s a showcase moment for the album’s emergent theme of duality.
Another metaphorical anchor for the record is Haugen’s considered instrumentation. Maybe Next Year follows in the footsteps of his 2019 debut, A List of Regrets, using piano-bass-drum combos paired with the occasional pad of strings. However, Haugen introduces other textures for this outing. Collaborating with producer Jordan Mayland (of Des Moines’ Birdroom Studios and bands like TiRES, The Wheelers and Volcano Boys), the two have added chorused guitars, organs and punchy brass into the fold.
Speaking with a core grammar, but finding ways to sprinkle new words into the vocabulary, as it were, is the perfect approach to a sophomore effort. It creates a throughline from entry to entry. Think Andy Shauf, going from The Party to The Neon Skyline: related subjects and atmosphere, but the follow-up expands on the table-setting a bit. Similar movement here indicates that Mark Haugen is an artist who takes the slower, subtler art of discography-building seriously. You start to wonder what’s in store for the “next year” of the album’s namesake.
Maybe Next Year is a complex but rewarding piece of art. The songs demand your full attention, because the poetics are often at odds with themselves. The closing song offers a beautiful sentiment, a call-to-action to be kinder to oneself. It’s a resounding, intentional punctuation mark on the end of the tracklist. But I believe that the listener has to send their own uncertainties and self-doubts into this album’s orbit to decide how they really gravitate: as an anchor eroding at the bottom of the sea, or a balloon floating by on the wind?
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2026 issue.
