Sydney pianist and composer Mark Andrew Hansen is back with another single, and it sounds almost nothing like the last one we covered. “Love Enough,” his 2020 pandemic-era collaboration with American vocalist Jes Hudak, was a tender, piano-led ballad about longing and separation. “Love Is Wrong Without You” released May 16th, 2025, is something else entirely – a bass-driven, dance-influenced groove built around a Stevie Wonder-inspired foundation, specifically the legendary bass work on “I Wish.” Hansen wrote the bass line first, which he says is rare for his process, and constructed everything else around it. The result is a song about the specific frustration of being deeply interested in someone who simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for it – played, pointedly, for laughs as much as for feeling.
This is definitely the funkiest song I’ve heard from Mark Andrew Hansen. Though harmonically it doesn’t venture into the stank face category, because it stays firmly put in that brighter pop framing the song needs, the mood is playful, not yearning. But the rhythm work is definitely very danceable and a bit of new territory for Mark. The punchy brass sections in the chorus do the Stevie Wonder homage proud, and the bridge sneaks in an ascending string line over a chromatically moving bass pattern that gives the track a moment of genuine musical sophistication without disrupting the groove. As with “Love Enough,” Hansen recorded everything at home with no compression or auto-tune, which keeps the performances feeling immediate and human even when the arrangement is this polished.
Hansen has said the closing lyric sums it up best: “it helps to be in love with someone who has the time and energy to be in love with you.” The song wears that lightly, which is exactly the right call. The humor lands because the music is actually having fun, not just describing fun – and that’s harder to pull off than it looks.