Billed as a country record, the San Francisco garage-rock hero’s eighth record with the Sunsets uses the genre as a means for chronicling the lives of lonesome men.
Sonny Smith’s New Day With New Possibilities is billed as a country album, but really, the cult San Francisco garage hero’s output with Sonny and the Sunsets has always felt like country music, even though it hasn’t always been delivered with a twang and a sigh. His best songs, about long-lost loves and fringe-dwelling stragglers, tell classic stories populated with well-worn American archetypes: They’re country at heart, even if gilded with garage-rock harmonies or post-punk synths. Then, of course, there’s Sonny himself—a troubadour out of time, content to move through life more as a chronicler of others’ lives than his own. “Everywhere I go in this world, I see lonely men/Where do we come from, where does it end, the lonely men?” he wonders on the very first line of “The Lonely Men,” New Day With New Possibilities’ spare, Callahan-esque opening track. A scene-setting overture to an album about searching, deep-seated forms of loneliness, it could just as easily be applied to the rest of Sonny’s music—a career spent profiling “broken men behind, broken men ahead.”
Although New Day With New Possibilities, Sonny’s eighth record with the Sunsets, might hew closest in genre to the fan favorite Longtime Companion, the aesthetic feels as much like a means to an end as anything else. It always has with Sonny: The reason his early records cherry-picked sounds with abandon, and the reason he could so easily write 200 songs in every genre under the sun for his 100 Records project, is because he’s always been attuned to genre as a canny literary device. So while New Day With New Possibilities taps into country’s potential to chronicle the lives of lonesome men in the same way that Longtime Companion mined the genre’s usefulness for conveying lovesickness, it actually feels, in the scheme of Sonny’s oeuvre, more of a piece with 2013’s Antenna to the Afterworld, which, in its reckoning with grief and loss, also touched on isolation: “I had a visit from a dead friend/She told me not to wallow in the loneliness.”
As if to prove the point, “Palm Reader,” a highlight from Antenna to the Afterworld, gets a reprise here. Where the original felt bright and lovestruck, brought to life by its post-punk synths and Sonny’s wry deadpan, “Palm Reader” circa 2021 is resigned: When Sonny sings, “My loveline, it’s hard to see/But it’s still there underneath,” he’s nostalgizing an affair, rather than cementing it. The only love songs on New Day With New Possibilities take this approach, looking at lost loves from an impossibly far remove. Take, for example, “Love Obsession,” a classic Sonny and the Sunsets campfire sing-along: “Heartbreak is my profession/I teach the school of rejection/Memories of you won’t let me get away,” Sonny sings, stomping along with the ease of a man who knows the only way to get through is to accept singledom as inevitability. “Earl & His Girl,” another classic in Sonny’s catalog of weirdo biographies, follows a lonely bounty hunter who tries to strike up a connection with the girlfriend of an abusive man, only to find that she’d rather stick with her boyfriend and shoot kids and squirrels. He stays positive, even after his horse leaves him, through the remembrance of a mantra: “May there be a road that takes me to where I need to go.”
If it sounds bleak, that’s because it is: New Day With New Possibilities, although as lush and pleasant to listen to as ever, showcases a darker, rawer side of Sonny’s writing. It’s a bittersweet tonic after the one-two punch of 2016’s Moods Baby Moods and 2019’s Hairdressers From Heaven, albums produced by James Mercer and Merrill Garbus, respectively, that felt like they lacked something of Sonny’s pastoral outsider charm. And although New Day With New Possibilities skews dark, there’s still plenty of warmth to be found, if you know where to look. “Just Hangin by Myself,” the record’s centerpiece, radiates contentment, finding intense satisfaction in solitude: “I’m just hangin’ out by myself,” Sonny repeats. It’s a group singalong for one, an unassuming affirmation that’s quintessentially Sonny: He’s documented loneliness so thoroughly, he might just be on the verge of finding a cure for it.
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