Key Lyric: “Love. Is Here. To STAY.”
This song reflects a period of forced optimism breaking apart. While at my Jesuit college, I was involved in Undergraduate Government advocating for a LGBTQ+ resource center and dedicated staff to support queer students. My school didn’t have those resources, not like Fordham or Georgetown. In the months after my assault, I threw myself into that cause. In my mind, I was channeling my pain into optimism and justice while working with a donor who had pledged a hefty gift to fund these resources.
Just weeks after getting roofied, the university rejected the donation because it was specifically intended for queer students. That moment shattered the fragile optimism I had been clinging to. The anger from the assault and the school’s refusal to support queer students collided quite publicly and my emotions were labeled as mania, leading to hospitalization and medication that suppressed my creativity for years.
Sunshine Lollipops & Rainbows focuses on that moment of anger. Its bright instrumental slowly glitches and destabilizes, culminating in a sonic eruption after the line “we don’t want a million dollars for the gays,” representing the moment when suppressed rage, grief, and injustice finally overwhelmed me. My mania, if you will.
Purpose (Why this song?)
The Creative Process:
The creative process for Sunshine was defined by a motivation to create a song that represented “mania,” or at the very least, the emotions that surround what mania is usually described as. For me, that was a few things: An extremely forward energy that isn’t actually energized, loudness, and a sense of uncomfortable positivity. Throughout the creation process of the song, I came back to these ideas time and time again to shape the song’s vocals and production. The vocals are forward but don’t contain the same joy as Lesley’s original. The marimbas and steel drums are produced to sit within the vocals, rather than around them. So on and so forth. This is most notable in the song’s outro. During this section, I got to play with tempo and extreme distortion to fully illustrate the moment where my anger “popped” and I was considered manic by my community. I’ve never put my anger into music quite so literally, so it was really cool to get to work on that.
I had already finished Supercut by the time of thinking about Sunshine as the next track in the album, and so wanted something that could stand in contrast to Supercut’s Ocean Outro. Something to bring the energy back after “sitting and watching the water” for nearly two minutes. And for me, the answer was to arise from the water onto a lively daytime beach. As such, the sonic identity of Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows is based around Beach levels from my favorite retro games. Most notably, I was inspired by the “musical caffeine” I like to describe the Kirby soundtrack as & Treasure Trove Cove from Banjo Kazooie for the Nintendo 64.
Sonic Identity
Core Sounds
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What’s a beach level without some catchy steel drums? Although I’m not composing for a video game, I really tried to embody the idea that this beat could be used for one. I have them playing the melody of Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows here, which I think creates a cool border to my vocals throughout the track.
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I love the marimbas. I never got the chance to do things like Orchestra during my education… I was a singer. But in my time as a listener, to those band shows & countless songs across albums, games, movies, and more: I have grown to really love percussion instruments. The melodic ones have always been especially interesting to me. To get that beach sound just right, I knew I had to bring in something percussive… my marimba moment!
During the creative process, I ran into some headaches trying to get them to sit alongside the bass just right. I wanted them to almost blend together, without loosing any of the marimba’s woodiness. Hopefully it comes through!
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In Lesley Gore’s original, she features a chorus behind her in the sections of the song that follow her lyric “Everybody!” As I was recording mine, without a chorus at my disposal, I realized that it all just sounded wrong. You can’t invite everybody to sing with you, and then not have anyone join in. Please.
That’s why I set up a vocodor for these parts of the song. I have it running my own vocals through with various subtle timing effects to create the ambience of a full choir joining me to sing. I’m sure there’s something ironic here.
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The Bit-Crusher was my best friend in this track. Essentially, this tool is part of the distortion family of effects and plugins, offering the ability to “crush” an audio into the sounds of old 8-bit & 16-bit sound chips. Of course, many of the sounds of those chips were designed for those chips, so the effect isn’t 1-to-1 in making a song sound like it comes from a GameBoy… but, it does create a pretty decent N64 effect if used right.
For its use here, I wanted dramatic effect. So it comes in throughout the song to slightly emphasize certain lines and sections of the song where the instrumental destabilizes. But it shines in the last section, where I fully crush the master to make it sound. Just completely messed up. It’s so much fun, and wouldn’t be possible without the good old plugin
There’s a few reasons I’m singing Lesley Gore here. The reason that stands out has to do with the story that the song represents to the album itself. As I mentioned earlier, I had been working with a donor who was going to help fund LGBTQ+ resources at BC. I also was just friends with the guy. And back when my college boyfriend dumped me, I remember the donor friend sending me a podcast about Lesley’s song You Don’t Own Me. My ex was really into the idea of freedom, in a way that caused us to clash. I think he was giving me a band aid for that situation… But regardless, it reintroduced me to Lesley and provided me my first image of an older gay man stanning an artist the way I might stan Lady Gaga or Kesha. It always stuck with me. So, for the song about my school rejecting my friend’s donation on my album where I’m covering the artists I stan, I wanted to cover an artist he stanned!
Storyline
Key Moments
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Throughout the song, I took advantage of a tool called the Beat Breaker in Logic Pro to communicate mental instability. This was established lightly in the For Boston track, but truly comes out to play in this song. Unlike its use in other songs, all of the Beat Breaker work is being done on the Master. This means that when it cuts out a certain audio, it’s not simply targeting an instrument or individual voice but the entire track, itself. This creates a really cool effect where the track can completely cut out at points.
This effect starts small at the beginning of the song, acting just slight enough to be heard in one of the steel drums. But as the song goes on, and the clear anger behind my fake positivity grows, the effect begins to grow. By the end of the song, the beat is so messed up that it just becomes a wall of sound that I can’t imagine sounds pleasant to a first-time listener. Just like how for me, all the anger reached a point where I was just done and any context lost meaning. I popped. My song popped too.
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Speaking of popping, I’ve included the exact moment of it happening in the song. I bring back one of the text-to-speech voices from For Boston during the song’s initial ending, having it as a male voice revealing that the school rejected a donation for a million dollars on the account of it being specified for queer students. In other words, “we don’t want a million dollars for the gays.” For me, that’s when the structure I had created for my pain & rage fell apart. The rage had nowhere to go and my emotions exploded. Likewise, after the song makes that revelation, it sonically explodes. Both being crushed and expanded at the same time. I hope it communicates how angry that decision made me. Cuz in the moment it wasn’t taken seriously, at all. It was called a Delusion of Grandeur.
