Sunshine & the Blue Moon

The future can be a scary thing to think about And Ontario psych/folk band Sunshine & The Blue Moon are here to help. Their new LP Welcome To The Future just dropped this month on The Hand Recordings, and apparently the “effects that our collective human selves wreak upon our poor planet” have lead singer Kai Davey-Bellin using his position as a musician to educate people, in a non soapbox preachy kind of way. In the bands’ new video for the S/T single off the album, “Welcome To The Future”, Sunshine & The Blue Moon appear on a faux children’s show set dressed up as barn animals, taking a lighthearted approach to discuss some serious issues.

“A plant cannot grow unless you give it all you know. Yes, all you know.” Check it out.

“I notice others are less inclined to want to listen to, or talk about these stories because they’re often told to us in a harsh, stark doomsday kind of way,” he told me. “I thought maybe I would try to write the tragedies into a less alarmist, more upbeat hopeful song, and maybe listeners will absorb it and think about it with a more positive tone.”
Watch the premiere of the video, and remember to always keep calm and listen to good music. –Maya Eslami - What Youth

On their debut full-length, Toronto psych-roots band Sunshine & The Blue Moon indulge this old chestnut: sometimes you must go backwards to go forwards.

Across its nine songs, produced and engineered by Dave Plowman, Welcome To The Future leads a revue of early country, honking Springsteenian heartland rock, paisley-printed folk and funk all fragmented and reassembled by a grungy kaleidoscopic filter.



And just as the album follows all the tributaries of pop music from a few fateful decades, its inception, too, was about interconnectedness. "I found myself amongst all these really great fun-loving and like-minded musicians who were willing to play," the band's Kai Davey-Bellin says, "so we decided to go into the studio, most of us for the first time. Sounds corny, I'm sure, but if we were to describe the mood on this album I'd say we're trying to promote awareness of our interconnectivity, not just with ourselves as people, but the entire natural world too."

Davey-Bellin told us more about the influences you'll find on Welcome To The Future:

Some of the material on this album was written as far back as 2007, so inevitably my musical influences and songwriting styles, reflect those times in my life, whether it was the music I was listening to, the movies I was watching, the news coming at me from the radio, or maybe if I was in love, the songs are a reflection of all that. Maybe we draw from certain late '60s revolutionary ideals, that awareness and change can be nurtured through song and other forms of expression.
Sunshine & The Blue Moon's Welcome To The Future is out September 16th on The Hand Recordings. You can pre-order here.

Catch the band live at the following dates:

Sept 16 - Toronto - Silver Dollar
Oct. 18 - Quebec City - Sous-Sol Du Cercle
Oct. 21 - Halifax POP - Gus Pub
Oct. 22 - Halifax POP - TBD - Chart Attack

Toronto-based Sunshine & The Blue Moon has just released a new track, titled “Sunshine & Lucy” and we are very excited to be premiering this song. The band also has an album in the works right now, titled Welcome To The Future, which will be out September 16th.
The track is laid back and smooth. A soothing guitar line is front and center, and low vocal accompany it, with the light backup vocals wisp in the background. Regarding the music, Kai from Sunshine & The Blue Moon said, “I’m a bit of a sap, I love the idea of Love. Is there true love? Do we create this love based on instincts or fantasies, or is love itself an instinct? I don’t mind any which way, I’m just happy to have experienced, or at least to have witnessed it. I wanted to try to capture that with a warm music video shot on film, giving the impression of a long lost burgeoning romance captured on warm film, maybe found in a dusty box, on a dusty shelf somewhere, to be viewed with a smile, as a reminder, a vignette of the very thing that drives us.”
Beautiful. - Impose