dianasenechal
This album is freakishly good. I mean, I'm used to good stuff from Sonny Smith / Sonny & the Sunsets, but damn... so real and tuneful and full of treats of sound. As for my favorite track, it's a tough call between at least five of them (including "Waiting," "City Life," "Pink Cake," "How to Make a Ceramic Dog," and "Androids"), but I'll pick "Sit-ups" for now.
Favorite track: Sit-ups.
On Self Awareness Through Macrame, Sonny shows us that he can still kick out the classics like the old days while keeping it fresh and fun with lyrics and melodies that are forever getting caught in the folds of your brain. And is there a record with more beautiful cover art released this year? No. No there's not.
Favorite track: Signs.
“My parents were living in Bolinos when i was born. this was the early 70’s. 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 Bolinos 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 ofI 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 fashism 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 Bolinos 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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Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
“My parents were living in Bolinos when i was born. this was the early 70’s. 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 Bolinos 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 ofI 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 fashism 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 Bolinos 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.
Sonny & the Sunsets are a beautiful west coast thing. Birthed from the sand, the surf, and twilight campfires down in Ocean
Beach, Sonny & the Sunsets’ busted beach-pop songs spark recollections of doo wop's otherworldly despair, a dose of goofball humor from the Michael Hurley school, and positive possibilities exuded by Jonathan Richman....more
