A song inspired by counterculture revolutionaries. Days of Sunshine and Rage muses the struggle for social justice, the need for truth, wisdom, love, and a good heart.
violent
It was around 2008. I’d been watching a documentary on The Weather Underground and reading about Fred Hampton and the revolutionary edges of the 60’s counterculture. I felt an overwhelming sadness about the whole thing. The brutality and racism of the establishment, the desperation of youth confronted with being drafted into the horrors of the Vietnam War, the young lives lost or ruined, the colossal never-ending struggle to wrestle power from psychopathic, inhumane leaders.
Days of Sunshine and Rage along with Mockingbird were the first songs I’d demoed for around ten years years. Studies, work, running my own business, and parenting had consumed me. I’d kinda gone straight.
Yet, there’s no escaping the muse – if you want to be happy. The songwriter in me is core to my world view. Music-making is what I do intuitively, it’s powerful mojo – light as a bee’s wing and dark as a jaguar’s shadow. I must have drinketh deeply of the sound sense as a kid, its bliss, an aural elixir to counter the mundane, like a grassy, glistening pathway for a bare foot wanderer to reach a higher place. From an early age, probably around four years old, maybe from previous lives, music was the truest thing about existence. Music expanded my mind – church music, rock, punk, ska, soul, jazz & blues, dub & reggae, folk & country, experimental, classical, electronic, hip hop, house music, and a hoard of other musics played in a multitude of spaces, in an endless number of ways. All the best and worst times punctuated with music.
As a devotee of The Byrds, C,S,N & Y, and all that West Coast country-psychedelia of the 60s, a highlight of publishing this song in 2015, was that founding Byrd and counterculture icon David Crosby commented positively about it on Twitter. Momentarily, the cats whiskers of the internet lit up like a rainbow. I can’t find the screenshot. I’ll keep an eye out.
A few thoughts on the song…
Days of Sunshine and Rage is the fifth track on The Suns of Albert’s psychedelic trip – ‘Waking Up in Eden‘ (which is worthy of a listen, if you have an hour to spare).
It begins with a dark, destabilising, transitional soundscape, overlaid with the end of a Fred Hampton speech, from which the folky acoustic, and sparkly electric finger-picked chords emerge. It has a Laurel Canyon vibe about it. We all play and sing great. Everyone cooks on a six-stringed guitar. I even get to blaw, blaw, sook on a harmonica for the instrumental.
Beware, bongos are within.
It ends Beatlesy.
To me, Days of Sunshine and Rage is saying yeah to the revolution, as long as it’s a rebellion of truth, equity, wisdom, dignity, compassion, solidarity and love, with care for the planet at its core.
When we released Waking Up In Eden (the LP that this song is on), maybe a year or so later, The British Library Sound Archive got in touch and asked if we’d like to archive it. So, we sent the files and they published them via their online catalogue. It felt like our soul-endeavours had been recognised in a folk sense, that an Alan Lomax hologram from 2323 would discover its wonders. Sooner would be fine.
Anyways, the BLSA got hijacked by malicious bots and now most of their content has been taken down. I presume they don’t have the funds to republish it. C’est bummer. They have an email address, so maybe I’ll try and noise them up. Gently…
If you’d like to know how Days of Sunshine and Rage is played and what the words say…
Chords: Open G, Open F | C, Am, A | G, Bm, C, Am, A
(When I say Open, I mean a wonky barre chord played over five strings with the thumb on the bass note, and the 1st string unbarred so it rings out like a drone)
Lyrics
Radiating sunshine
Or organising rage
Either one attractive
In this degenerate age
Synchronising heartbeats
To lighten someone’s load
Marching with a message
To carry it down the road
What is the message we transmit?
Are we just children, trying to fit…in?
Johnny was a wild one
Struggling with his heart
’til that explosion
Blew his soul apart
Another dreamer left alone
Until his ashes found a home
Instrumental
Syncopated footsteps
Dance up to the door
Truncheoned into apathy
But forever making scores
One day their empire will be sand
But in the meantime, hold my hand
Buy 24-bit/44.1kHz .WAV of Days of Sunshine and Rage for £2 on Bandcamp
Written, produced and recorded by The Suns Of Albert in a Seafield flat on a Mac Book Pro (2012), an Mbox 2 Pro A/D, and Adobe Audition CS6.