Just as the 2020 presidential election was underway, Joe Sumner was urged to release “Hope.” Featuring a collection of guest artists, including Ben Folds, Juliana Hatfield, Gaby Moreno, and his father Sting, “Hope” was a longing plea for the present days—Hope, won’t you come back to me / And make me a believer / And set my heart free—and Sumner’s debut as a solo artist more than a decade-long run with the band Fiction Plane.
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More began percolating, leading to Sumner’s 2021 singles “You You You” and “Looking For Me, Looking For You,” a year later before his live EP, Feelin’ The Love, Tastin’ The Fear, recorded in Strasbourg, France, and final single “Love Life” before he was finally ready to reveal his solo debut Sunshine In The Night.
Revisiting some songs that he initially wrote more than a decade earlier as well as newer tracks, the blueprint of an album was in place. “They kind of have their roots there,” Sumner tells American Songwriter of the timeline of songs and his journey toward releasing his first solo album. “There was some little kernel of something back then that just became a song. It’s kind of crazy to think that it took that long to put it to commit to for the solo album.”
He continued, “I was doing the work, internally, emotionally, figuring out my identity, and trying not to overthink it—and then definitely overthinking it. I finally found a place where I was like ‘This is good. I’m going to present this piece of work as the thing that happened during this time.’”
Working with producer Tom Syrowski (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam), Sunshine In The Night, began shaping into a collection of pop-driven stories revolving around love, connection, and family ties and flecked by some folk and Americana undertones.
Opening on the more spectral “Hold Me Closer, Squeeze Me Tighter” and country-dipped song of resilience “Hope,” Sumner emits all the lightness he can find through the more prodding “Speak with Kindness” and resurfaces another earlier single “Looking For Me, Looking For You.”
“There’s musical threads that tie them all together,” shares Sumner. “There are some little themes if you listen closely, in the bass lines and melodies. The bass line in the first song ‘Hold Me Closer, Squeeze Me Tigher’ is the main melody throughout the album, so that tied everything together for me.”
On “See You Again,” Sumner taps into a lower fi croon along with a song of regret “You You You.” The verbosely titled “A Man Without a Head Navigates the Intellectual Dark Web” is one of the more socially aware narratives on the album and explores more existential ideas and beliefs that Sumner began dissecting several years earlier.
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“There was this intellectual dark web that started a few years ago, and it was basically a bunch of podcasters of atheists and free thinkers,” says Sumner. “I started listening to this stuff and there was a lot of philosophy and a lot of existentialism. I can be very decoupling and dissociative. I can think about a subject without any emotion, just put it there in a science lab and look at it on its own, and it can be very emotional or triggering, but I can say ‘No, it’s in the lab. It’s nothing.’
There’s a limit to your destiny / Your mission is complete / But are we more than just the bodies that we live in … Is the world outside our brains only allowed to feel this strange / Are we shrouded in complexity / Do we have no power to change sings Sumner on the track, which also questions the self and one place along with other socio-political slanted ideas. The spread of certain beliefs and concepts was more prevalent during the pandemic, he says, when many people were feeling lost.
“You get into this whole thing of ‘Is there really a self?'” says Sumner. “Is there a consistent self throughout your life? And then it starts to go into all of this is political philosophy and then there’s this weird right-wing of people that start entering the space, and I was like ‘Where are we?'”
Sunshine In The Night is a continuous string of Sumner’s consciousness punctuated by the upped piano ballad “Don’t Change the Love” and the more rousing “Don’t Go Away” and “Live Life,” a track Sumner says convinced him to move ahead with his solo album.
“It’s the simplest song on the album by miles,” Sumner says of “Live Life.” He adds, “And when I wrote it, I said ‘I feel comfortable.’ I think it’s the first time I’ve ever written a four-chord song. I just felt so comfortable and able to express something and leave it up to the lyrics and leave it up to the melodies to do everything else. And that’s when I felt that I could put this out in the world.”
Following his break from Fiction Plane after their 2015 release Mondo Lumina, getting into a solo space was a slow run, at first, for Sumner. “It was interesting coming out of a band where every decision has to be a little bit … democratic, sort of methodical, and justifying this move or this change. My move into solo was really all about ‘I will make a decision, and I’ll feel okay about it.’”
He continues, “Sometimes you have an idea, and the way that idea is in your head feels huge. Then you try and put it on paper and into a song and it feels much smaller. I’m trying to get the confidence to really just put the idea down, and the music will be as big as the idea of the music, and I think I got there in a lot of places.”
Still finding himself as an artist, Sumner says he gained more confidence performing in a David Bowie Alumni Tour in 2019. The series of tribute concerts, featuring former Bowie band members, and produced by his longtime pianist Mike Garson, helped Sumner take the next step. The prior tour was still imprinted in Sumner several nights earlier when he shared a transcendent version of Bowie’s Hunky Dory hit “Life on Mars” during a City Winery show in New York City several nights earlier.
“That gave me confidence because all the [former Bowie] musicians said ‘He [Bowie] hired me for the gig. He didn’t really tell me what was going to happen, and then we just did it,” recounts Sumner. He wasn’t fussy about how it was going. It was ‘ I’m casting this person, and they’re going to do what they do.’”
Bowie’s unwavering nature as an artist has always been appealing to Sumner. “He went through so many transformations as an artist,” he says. “It was ‘Whatever, just go for it.’ If you made a methodical decision as David Bowie to do any of those things, you probably wouldn’t do it … like ‘Why are you suddenly wearing tights? Why are you Ziggy [Stardust]?’ I learned that it’s okay to make rash decisions, and I feel a lot more confident.”
Outside his reverence for Bowie, Sumner does give himself plenty of merit these days and says his confidence has extended by performing most of his shows stripped back with nothing more than vocals and an acoustic guitar.
“Just playing an acoustic guitar, just me on my own, I can hold a crowd of any size like that, and that feels great,” shares Sumner. “And it’s with songs they never heard. It sort of crystallizes it for me, especially lyrically. I’m saying the lyrics over and over again, every night. It really flows through me, and I start to take on that personality, so I’ll really know when people fully get what I’m saying.”
Some of the songs Sumner slips into his setlist are the final two on the album, which were written about his children. For Sumner, Sunshine In The Night is a lengthy love letter to his family. Tracing back to “Juliet,” written about his daughter 11 years earlier, Sumner’s folkier ballad penned for his children, “Jellybean”—My tiny child / My running wild / My sunshine in the night / You saved me from the darkness / And you took me to the light—directly reveals where his thoughts gravitated while writing.
“Going through life, not knowing what the future is, and having these children, it’s the sunshine in the night and the darkness of everything,” says Sumner. “It’s my whole purpose. It’s the whole meaning. It’s my whole reason for everything.
Photos: Dennis Dirksen / Courtesy of Vicious Kid PR
