Sunny War

With the Sun

Folk

Hen House Studios
2018

Music

premiere: sunny war serves up a heartbreaking folk masterpiece on ‘with the sun’

February 1, 2018
114 Picks

“I’m a drunk and a dreamer / I’m a punk closet screamer.” Contradictions run deep in Sunny War’s music. The delicate fingerpicking, lush strings, and hushed singing belie an album full of pain and conflict. It’s an album where the most defiant moments tend to be the quietest, demanding you listen close.

Standout tracks like “I’m Human” and “Static” give Sunny War’s impressive guitar chops a workout beneath a heartbreaking vocal delivery. The album came from an effort to put less focus on her guitar playing and more on lyrical content, but that doesn’t mean the guitar suffers. Many of With The Sun‘s most jaw dropping moments come when Sunny War performs a deft sleight of hand on the fretboard like it’s nothing, particularly the plaintive “Finn.”

The record closes with the stunning “Come Back.” With a string part designed to rip your heart out still beating, Sunny War delivers lines like “Like in a song / you are stuck in my head / come back to me.” Like the best of With The Sun, it’s simple, painful, and true.

Sunny War explains:

“With The Sun” lyrically consists of poems from my diary.  In 2016 I decided I was focusing too much on guitar and not enough on singing or WHAT I was singing.  I made myself write more poems and tried to turn to the notebook more when I was feeling something.  One morning I woke up and saw an unarmed black man get shot by police on Facebook.  I wrote “I’m Human” that very day.  In 2017 I was sober for 6 months (I relapsed before the end of the year) and I wrote “Static” as a personal “Keep going, you can do it!” type of thing.  I didn’t really have a plan or vision for this album, I just let it happen and come to me and I think that’s the approach to music I want to stick to.

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