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RIYH 012LP
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"My parents were living in Bolinas when i was born. this was the early '70s. there was alot of weaving, ceramics, banjo playing and this kind of thing back then. My mom said the other day she had developed a course, to be taught at the Bolinas community center, Self-Awareness Through Macrame. i said 'oh, thats interesting, do you keep in touch with any of the students?' she said 'no, no one signed up'. that made me laugh. This record was mostly made during the pandemic, in a few masked sessions. The songs came about organically with Josiah Flores, Ava Lynch, just playing around in the pandemic with no agenda. Tahlia Harbour and Rusty Miller appeared later on most tracks and then a few other friends sprinkled around towards the end. Waiting came about watching my teen age son during the pandemic, waiting in his room for something to change. He was sewing a lot, making garments. I began to imagine he was sewing an outfit he would wear when he would leave this weird dystopian planet, when a UFO came down and helped all the teenagers escape the dumpster planet we've made. Shadows was also about the pandemic, and imagining our shadows to be our friends from another realm, always sticking by our side, up until death. City Life came out of moving to the country during the record. When I would visit the city it took on a new feeling, it felt more like a sci-fi landscape, and I could see a lot more of the city innards then when I lived inside it. All the wires, and dirt and crazy human energy, everything was more vibrant and daunting. 'How to Make a Ceramic Dog,' came about as I started making ceramic dogs for people during the pandemic, and I thought I might write a how-to song about it, and how facsism is all around these days and how to just put it aside sometimes just to make something pure. People love their dogs, and dogs during the pandemic took on a certain heroic feature. People really leaned on their pets during the pandemic, so when I began making their dogs in clay the orders went crazy and suddenly I was making hundreds of dogs. Somehow the ceramics and moving to the country near Bolinas all felt a little tied to the way my parents were living when I was born, banjos, sewing, ceramics, dogs, things being built by hand, and escaping the city and such."
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RIYH 005LP
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"'It was before Covid, I had this big free empty studio in the hills, I was supposed to be painting, that was my initial plan, and I just began making songs on an old guitar, songs about being alone, songs about failed men, some dark tales of longing. I was reading some old western paperbacks, and I would go on these walks in the hills, come inside and write these kind of lonesome country songs. Then the pandemic began, and everyone was alone now, and it felt like it had been strangely prescient to write about being alone,' speaks Sonny Smith about the birth of his new record. It sounds like it's part of a genre that should have happened: a sixties teen country music that merged with sixties pop. New Day With New Possibilities, the latest 'country' offering by Sonny And The Sunsets, is clearly a companion piece to the cult loved third Sunsets release Longtime Companion, the laid back country record which marked the beginning of the Sunsets as an explorative project and not just locked into one sound. New Day With New Possibilities joins with a kind of Michael Hurley homegrown sound but also leaning into Chelsea Girls baroque strings sound as on 'Driftin' and 'The Lonely Men'. Pedal steel maestro Joe Goldmark lifts the record into Doug Sahm and Buck Owens territory."
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