Some songs take longer than others to find their way out of the bedroom. In the case of “Sunshine Girl,” it took decades. Reverends frontman Dandy Lee Strickland wrote the song when he was 15, self-consciously hiding it away.
Now it has finally emerged as one of the more audacious tracks on Sunsight, Sunclipse (Little Cloud), the Atlanta-based psych-rock band’s third album, which finds Strickland and Co. pushing the limits of their shoegazed cosmic Americana in a good way. Recorded at Reverends’ studio and rehearsal space, the LP was co-produced by Strickland and multi-instrumentalist Matt Boehnlein, who also recorded and mixed it.
“I was pretty shy back then, so I was too ashamed to ever play ‘Sunshine Girl’ for anybody,” says Strickland of his 15-year-old self. “When I came back to it more recently, the second verse needed fixing, so I rewrote that, and then I brought it to (guitarist) Andy (Watts). He’s kind of the arbiter of my ideas. He’d always wanted to do ‘Sunshine Girl,’ but I was still too embarrassed, like, ‘I can’t—teenage Dandy wrote this.’”
Then Strickland took a trip to the Levitation festival in Austin, Texas, where he witnessed younger bands embracing the sort of stuff he’d loved as a teenager.
“I was like, ‘Shit, I should’ve just put it out back then,’” he says. “So when we went into the studio for the new record, I told everyone in the band to play the filthiest, most fucking fuzz-drenched, ’90s-sounding shit they could. It was so funny—I think we ended up piling on something like 40 guitar tracks.”
We’re proud to premiere Reverends’ “Sunshine Girl.” Sunsight, Sunclipse is out August 7.
—Hobart Rowland
