HIRAIDAI invites listeners to relax, soak up the sun, and get emotionally vulnerable on 2016’s Life Is Beautiful. While the singer-songwriter hadn’t abandoned the island flavor of his earliest releases, he was already expanding his style to go beyond Hawaiian music. The previous year’s Slow & Easy found HIRAIDAI supplementing his ukulele ballads about slowing down with punched-up dance-pop numbers. For Life Is Beautiful, HIRAIDAI dug into his acoustic side, adding country textures and folksy melodies to his repertoire. The album’s more upbeat tone emerges from the jump on Life Is Beautiful. Opener “Faraway” finds HIRAIDAI adding a Nashville stomp to an uptempo number about going forward and enjoying life. Country touches appear all over the full-length. Instrumental track “Locals Only” features harmonica and honky-tonk guitars. The stripped-down acoustic ballad “Tonight” catches HIRAIDAI at his most tender. These sonic textures aren’t too much of a departure from the sparse Hawaiian backdrops he first gained attention with—and have the added benefit of allowing him space to showcase his magnetic voice. Still, HIRAIDAI nods to his surfer origins on the mellow “See You At the Ocean.” He also draws from fellow acoustic artists such as Jack Johnson and Jason Mraz, adding light reggae rhythms to his cover of the latter’s hit “I’m Yours.” “A Good Day” and “Stay” bathe in the glow of romance over no-rush guitar arrangements, while “Everything Is Music” picks up the pace to revel in the joys of sound—a fitting moment on an album exhibiting the artist’s many musical influences.