Sunny came home mandolin full#
Sunny came home mandolin free#

Its arrangement is spare and dark, spotlighting Colvin’s trademark percussive guitar style with which she made her mark on her 1989 debut Steady On. ‘The Facts About Jimmy’ is a brooding and resigned cautionary tale about an all-too lovable rogue the suitably enigmatic ‘You & the Mona Lisa’ has another sun-drenched chorus and fan favourite ‘Trouble’ deals with disaffection, disappointment, dependence and the inevitable allure of bad things, bad people and bad situations. As a partner in crime, this one-man musical freak-of-nature is any singer-songwriter’s dream come true and, as a consequence, it seems clear that ‘A Few Small Repairs’ is just as much Leventhal’s baby as it is Colvin’s. And that’s before we even mention Leventhal’s contributions on keyboard, bass, mandolin and harmonica. All the dream toppings that Shawn Colvin could wish for on her already accomplished acoustic backbones are there.

The production is every good word you can think of (exquisite, glorious and inspired are the first three that come to mind) with multi-instrumentalist Leventhal turning in some of the most beautiful and tasteful guitar playing of his career and it’s of all persuasions: tremolo-flooded clean parts dirty, impassioned lead breaks textural pedal steel swirls. These two tracks open the album and alone they are a clear indication that Colvin and long-time collaborator John Leventhal are on the form of their lives, both in terms of songwriting and vision. However, the seam of destruction in the lyric is countered by the song’s cosy mandolin intro and blissfully melodic singalong chorus and this, for me, is a big part of Colvin's appeal: sweetness and darkness, constantly encircling one another. This could be read as incitement to arson (or at the very least as incitement to the misuse of a toolkit) for anyone who finds themselves downtrodden by domesticity. It’s the tale of a woman metaphorically putting her house in order by literally burning it to the ground.

Sunny came home mandolin free#

It's a blistering juggernaut: pounding and energetic, crowned by its howling harmonica line, helping the song unleash its rage and setting the tone for the rest of the record.Ī Few Small Repairs is littered with songs about breaking free and starting over (it's probably worth mentioning that Colvin divorced her first husband a year before its release) and while 'Get Out of This House' sat well with the zeitgeist, it was ‘Sunny Came Home’ - the album's second single - that really made everyone stand up and take notice. The album's first single 'Get Out of This House' appealed to fans of the feisty-female genre popularised by Alanis Morissette and Meredith Brooks in the middle nineties and comes across like a righteously pissed off Sheryl Crow.

This means that I can now justify the opportunity to have a bit of a gush about one of my all-time favourite records of all-time, mate.

Sunny came home mandolin full#

The album subsequently went platinum in the US and, to celebrate its twentieth birthday, Sony are putting out a full remaster of the original release, replete with seven bonus live tracks - a mix of solo acoustic and full band recordings from the period. That was all about to change because by 1997 'Sunny Came Home' had become a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and earned Colvin two Grammy awards. In 1996, the year I turned 19, that disc was Shawn Colvin's A Few Small Repairs.Īlthough it was her third major label release, Colvin, at that time, was not well known in the UK. I would be recklessly impulsive, routinely choosing something I’d never heard before. Prohibitively expensive import CDs were a forbidden extravagance but once a year, on my birthday I allowed myself the purchase of just one deliciously overpriced disc. This was a time when new releases were still quite costly, so bargain bins and second-hand shops were usually where I went looking for treasure. As a teenager in the 1990s, hunting for CDs to feed my music addiction was pretty much my sole concern in life.