by Danie Colussi | From San Francisco, Sonny and the Sunsets charmed their way into Scout’s heart with their laid-back, West Coast take on the classic Brill Building, doo-wop-and-roll sound.

A true storyteller, frontman Sonny Smith’s character-songs abound with bizarro tales of stranded space-men, death creams, teenage thugs and the sweet joys of lovin’ older gals. His songs strike a balance between Jonathan Richman’s aw-shucks whimsy and Lou Reed’s dead-eyed burn out, and that’s some pretty heavy company to keep…

In support of the Fat Possum-released Hit After Hit, Smith and The Sunsets play The Waldorf on Monday June 27th, with Hunx And His Punx and The Sandwitches.  Don’t miss out!

Q. The songs on Tomorrow Is Alright and Hit After Hit often reflect a kind of 50’s rock’n’roll/doo-wop influence, and the recordings themselves recall the sound of that era.  This in a time when so many bands opt for over-the-top, intentionally shitty-sounding recordings.  How important is fidelity to your music? How much of a role does Kelley play in the sound of the albums?

A. Well, regarding fidelity, it’s just important to me that the stuff sounds warm and like a real band, that’s all, but sometimes these days to do that you have to step away from the computers and just play older instruments in a dank basement into a tape machine with no ‘professionals’ around. Kelley has been a big influence on me in that kind of spirit, i.e. just put an old mic up and a cheap tape machine and give it a go, and of course his drum style is my favorite.

Q. There are so, so many bands today. Why bother being in a band? Why do people do it?

A. There’s a lot of journalists out there too, why do you do it?

Q. The I Miss The Jams collection is a treasure.  When is a second installment coming out?

A. I hope volume 3 comes out someday soon. Any labels out there in Vancouver interested?

A. Between the 100 Bands project and your albums with the Sunsets, you’ve written an astounding number of songs in a relatively short period of time. I find a similarity between what you do and the kind of 50’s doo-wop/Brill Building school of songwriting. The classic songwriters of that era wrote in a very workmanlike, disciplined manner, pumping out new songs everyday. Is writing songs a scientific, workmanlike process for you? Do you put on a suit and tie and go into the study and write songs all day as if it were a 9 to 5 job?

A. That would be the ultimate, hey? Take the trolley in the morning, bring a bag lunch to an office and work on songs all day, with a secretary and a hat rack and a bird in a bird cage, maybe do a little detective work on the side, hit the gym after work, maybe meet an old friend for a drink, meet a girl for a movie after a long day at the office…

Q. So many of those classic Brill Building songwriters worked in pairs – Goffin/King, Leiber/Stoller, Greenwhich/Barry, etc. So how much do The Sunsets affect your music? What do they add?

A. I write the songs, but they’re there to record them, so those individual players effect what comes out…

Q. Is your bass player’s bass is really cool. Is it home made?

A. Nah it’s a kay bass, from the 50’s or early 60’s…

Q. You’re a man of many hats – musician, artist, playwright, writer of movie scripts and columns for magazines, your website contains fiction.  How does any one practice inform any of the others?

A. For me, I’ll start out writing a comic book and it will become a song, or I’ll be writing a novel and it’ll break down into an art project… so the lines are bleeding all the time, and things are morphing into eachother. So how they inform eachother, it’s almost hard to say, it’s one big tree with a bunch of different fruit.

Q. Nowadays bands have a MySpace, Tumblr, Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. With the internet, it’s really different from the time when you had to dig to find cool bands and had to decipher album art and make sense of what a band was about. I really enjoyed reading the biographies of the I Miss The Jams collection. Were I Miss the Jams and 100 Records in any way a response to how music is consumed differently today? Were you thinking about these kind of issues during the making of those projects?

A. I wasn’t making any kind of response, just trying to do something fun. 45’s are fun, and vinyl art is fun, and musician bio’s are fun. Jukebox’s are fun. Maybe what people got from my project wasn’t something I was necessarily trying to say: that mp3’s aren’t fun. I mean they’re fine to transport music to your computer and all, but no one is having fun putting an mp3 on their mantle. An mp3 isn’t something to covet, it’s more like a radio wave or something, intangible but carries a song to you. It’s the same with recording. No one is having a blast moving the mouse around a screen, moving little digital lines around to make the song sound better. It’s a tedious bunch of bullshit. However, I’ve seen people having fun twisting the knobs on a tape machine. So, maybe it’s just that the digital revolution, for all it’s assets, leaves people without physical or material payoffs sometimes…

OTHER INTERESTING PEOPLE

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.