Sunny Came Home

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Sunny Came Home”
Single by Shawn Colvin
from the album A Few Small Repairs
Released June 24, 1997
Format CD
Genre Rock, Contemporary Folk
Length 4:24
Label Columbia
Writer(s) Shawn Colvin, John Leventhal
Producer Malcolm Burn
Shawn Colvin singles chronology
"Get Out of This House"
(1996)		 "Sunny Came Home"
(1997)		 "You and the Mona Lisa"
(1997)
A Few Small Repairs track listing
"Sunny Came Home"
(1)		 "Get Out of This House"
(2)
Polaroids: A Greatest Hits Collection track listing
"This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)"
(8)		 "Sunny Came Home"
(9)		 "You And The Mona Lisa"
(10)

"Sunny Came Home" is a Grammy Award-winning folk-rock song by American musician Shawn Colvin. It is the theme song to her 1996 concept album A Few Small Repairs, and quickly became a hit when it was released as a CD single on June 24, 1997.

The song tells the story of Sunny, "a frustrated housewife who torches her own home."[1] It is one of several "story songs" on A Few Small Repairs, a method of songwriting Colvin began experimenting with while writing for the album. The title of the song comes from the opening lyrics.

The song's calming and upbeat music, fronted by a distinctive mandolin strum, contrasts sharply with the destructive lyrics, particularly the haunting bridge: "Count the years; you always knew it / Strike a match; go on and do it".[2]

"Sunny Came Home" is Colvin's most successful single to date. In the 1998 Grammy Awards, it was named Song of the Year and Record of the Year. It peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, and likely would have achieved a higher peak had it been released commercially sooner to correspond with the song's airplay maximum: it was #1 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart for four weeks and also #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart for four weeks. On the Hot 100 Single Sales chart, however, it peaked at #29. Colvin's record label did not plan to release the track as a retail single until it became an airplay favorite on CHR as well as AC and Adult Alternative radio stations and the label deduced that the song appealed to a younger audience who might be willing to buy the single.

It should be noted that the version that played on most radio stations was edited; approximately 30 seconds of instrumental music was cut out, mostly at the end of the song.

Contents

[edit] Trivia

  • At the end of the song, the lighting of a match can briefly be heard, followed by a quick breath to presumably put the flame out.
  • "Sunny Came Home" is sampled on Bobby Valentino's R&B album Special Occasion. The song is titled "Only Human".

[edit] Track listing

  1. "Sunny Came Home" (Colvin, John Leventhal) (4:24)
  2. "What I Get Paid For" (Colvin, Neil Finn) (3:23)

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Bio." Shawn Colvin. Accessed July 14, 2006.
  2. ^ Colvin, Shawn, and Leventhal, John. Lyrics. "Sunny Came Home". A Few Small Repairs. CD. Columbia. 1996.

[edit] External links