Mariel Loveland Is A ‘Good Girl’

As lead singer for Hoboken’s Best Ex, Mariel Loveland wasn’t always such a “Good Girl.” When we covered Best Ex in 2023, she was promising to ruin your life and the picture accompanying our story back then made it seem almost worth it. Now, though, she is, indeed, a “Good Girl” and it’s the irresistible title tune of her band’s upcoming album on Iodine Records to be released November 6. (Its eleven tracks were written in Brooklyn and Hoboken with producer Andy Tongren.)

"It's strange how often women are defined by who they belong to instead of who they are," she says. "We're so often viewed through the lens of being someone's daughter, wife, or mother, rather than simply existing as ourselves. I wanted to write a song that pushed back against that idea.

"I grew up loving these emotionally honest alternative rock records written by adults figuring life out," she continues. "Now I listen to a lot of incredible younger pop songwriters writing about being in your twenties, and I love those records too. But I kept wondering—where are the songs about everything that comes next? About getting older, watching friendships change, questioning your purpose, grieving people you've lost, building a life, and trying to figure out who you are when adulthood finally catches up with you."

Now a seasoned 30something, Other Good Girl tracks are “Is This It,” a song filled with her frustration with today’s era of misinformation, political division and alarming headlines, and “Sick Of Myself.” Loveland is provocatively expansive when she says, “I blinked and suddenly I was dealing with things that felt impossibly far away when I was younger. Marriage. Losing people. Watching my nieces and nephews become actual little humans. Friends moving across the country. Trying to build a stable life while the world outside feels increasingly uncertain. Looking back, I think this album became my way of making sense of that transition."