The Sun Will Rise(s)
What drew me to the Henny Penny folktale were all the themes that feel so applicable to 2024. Misinformation, panic, annihilation anxiety, misplaced trust, misinterpretations of reality, our interdependence as humans (and as a planet) and how one person’s decisions can have catastrophic affects on someone else. You know, really fun, light-hearted themes.
Given alllll of that, I figured this album needed an injection of hope. I wanted to be honest about these dark feelings, but I didn’t want to dwell in despair. And thusly, I wrote “The Sun Will Rise”… and then I wrote “The Sun Will Rise (Reprise)”… and then I wrote “First Light” in order to connect the two together on the album.
“What if truth was a person you met on the street late at night?”
The Personification of Truth
In the Henny Penny universe, misinterpreting reality is a core issue. The character, Henny Penny, was wrong about one key fact: it wasn’t the sky that was falling, it was just an acorn that fell on her head. Had this misperception not occurred, the story would have ended there, and her friends would still be alive in the end, rather than murder victims of Foxy Loxy. Correctly interpreting reality matters.
But that’s easier said than done. People are finite beings with fuzzy memories, limited brain capacity, and who have access to limited knowledge. On top of that, we have our own biases, which make us see the world through a particular lens, and sometimes that can further impair our ability to interpret reality correctly. And finally, we’re not just trying to correctly interpret inanimate objects around us, but we are also trying to make sense of what people tell us. But of course, people are imperfect, so we’re making sense of something they’ve made sense of — which introduces an extra possibility for error — not to mention the fact that people aren’t always known to be 100% truthful at all times. People lie to protect themselves, they bend the truth to get what they want, the exaggerate, they embellish, and sometimes, they straight up lie through their teeth. So as we’re navigating though life, we’re all just trying to make sense of… all of that.
“What were his answers to your questions when you asked about right and wrong?”
In “The Sun Will Rise”, I explored the idea of having a chance encounter with a new character, the embodiment of Truth. No lies. No deceptions. No manipulations. No confusion. No room for interpretation. No conspiracy theories — no theories whatsoever — just facts. Just truth.
I will pose the question to you. If you were to encounter the embodiment of truth, what questions would ask? What would you want to know? What burning questions do you have that you just want to get to the bottom of? What lingering confusion do you have about how the world works or about your own life experience, and what would you ask in order to get clarity?
When I think about what is illustrated each day when the sun rises, one of the things is that it is the movement from darkness into light. As light is introduced into a dark place, what is hidden is exposed. Light brings clarity.
The Long Lost Friend
I imagined another meetup with an embodied concept in “The Sun Will Rise”, and the second character was Tomorrow. The only thing about this Tomorrow is, he feels to you like a long lost friend.
There’s a mindset I can tend to have, and it’s what led me to writing Henny Penny: the presumption that tomorrow will be worse than today, and worse than yesterday. My mind fills in the gaps of the unknown with worst case scenarios. Things are bad now, things are hard, we had a full blown worldwide pandemic that killed millions of people, and what the hell is going on in the political sphere, not to mention the climate crisis, my goodness.
“Do you remember when we felt so afraid, but here we are now — we’re okay!”
But what if Tomorrow is like a long lost friend? What if Tomorrow feels familiar instead of unsettlingly different? What if Tomorrow is not hostile to you, but welcomes you as a friend? What if you could transport yourself into a hope-filled future, and in that future, talk through all the things you were worried about today, and come to see that none of them came to pass?
Part of me resists this notion as wishful thinking. But it’s not any more valid to fill in the gaps of an unknown future with predictions of a worst case scenario than it is to imagine a best case scenario. Maybe it’s an important exercise to do: what would the best case scenario of a future look like? It is probably a nobler thing to feed hope than to feed despair.
Winter at 4am
“Lift up your eyes, it will take you by surprise, the sun will rise”
You know what is a challenge? To write two different sets of lyrics for the same song. I don’t think I’ve ever attempted to do that before, but after I wrote “The Sun Will Rise”, I thought it would be cool to add a reprise, a cappella version, too.
In “The Sun Will Rise (Reprise)”, I thought about two scenarios where I have the most doubt about the goodness to come: when you can’t sleep in the middle of the night, and when the winter drags on and on.
It happens to me every year. Mid-March, we just got a few more inches of snow, we haven’t seen the sun in weeks, everything is grey and white and sludgy brown — both outdoors and also emotionally — and I can’t remember what the trees look like with leaves on them. I can’t remember what it feels like when the wind blows and it doesn’t hurt your skin, let alone what a warm breeze would feel like. I might vaguely remember that there are times in the year when I don’t have to suit up to go outside, or worry about tracking in all types of frozen moisture when I return home — but I can’t wrap my mind around having that type of freedom, because it’s been since before Christmas that I had it last. It’s like my brain simply cannot fathom the return of spring.
“You know it’s coming, the seasons always change, but even still you doubt the spring”
Likewise, whenever I have had times where I struggle to sleep at night, I would feel similarly about the return of the morning. Thankfully, I have not experienced this for a long time, but I did in 2020. I was so disturbed by the pandemic, by calloused and dehumanizing things that people would write on Facebook, and feeling like I did not know how to navigate all of that while maintaining a sense of internal peace, but also demonstrating integrity, without compromising my conscience. Sometimes I couldn’t turn my mind off. I couldn’t fall asleep, and I’d be afraid to look at the clock to see how much time I had spent not-sleeping, and worry about how tired I would be the next day. One thing would compound another, and it would make me even less likely to get to sleep. When you’ve been tossing and turning up onto the backdoor of 4am, you feel like the rest of your life is going to be a perpetual state of this non-sleeping night.
Ugh that’s depressing, isn’t it?
But here’s the thing: the sun does rise again. And you get another chance to sleep after it sets again. And in 2024, I can tell you that it was only about one week in 2020 when that was a significant issue.
“You toss and turn in the stillness of your room, while the earth turns toward the light”
“It’s always darkest before the dawn”, they say. It’s really true. But the dawn always comes. The spring always returns. New life always grows back. Sometimes it’s a different species of tree or bush or flower, but new life continues to emerge. Things have gotten bad in the world before, and yet the sun has never ceased to rise, and new life has never stopped bursting forth.
The sun, indeed, will rise.
First Light
This will be my final blog post about the Henny Penny songs, so I will indulge in this opportunity to talk about “First Light”, the 41 second piano-only track on the album. I wanted to have a song that connects “The Sun Will Rise” (E-flat major) to its companion song “The Sun Will Rise (Reprise)” (C major). So I played the leading motive in E-flat major, and that first phrase ends on the chord B-flat major. Then I played a variation of the motive in B-flat major, and from there it’s not too far of a stretch for the ear to play it again one step up, in C major. Then I went on to the the second phrase of the main melody in C major, and whoop-di-doo, now our feet are firmly planted in C major.
Miscellany
One of my favorite things about making Henny Penny was that it helped me grow in my production skills, and “The Sun Will Rise” was an example of what I like best about producing — I get to play the instrument of other people playing their instrument. I didn’t have a solid plan of what I wanted electric to play on this song, but I left room for there to be an electric solo, and I had Bryan record a bunch of ideas. Same with piano — Matt recorded a bunch of ideas. I got to take all of those electric and piano files home, and then I got to pick which moments to use. I can’t play electric like Bryan and I can’t play piano like Matt, but I can use ProTools, so I get to cosplay as them for a moment. What a rush.
I noticed one day that “The Sun Will Rise” got a huge influx of streams one day. When I looked into it, I saw that it had gotten added to a playlist called “rap city”. Fishy sign #1: wrong genre. I also noticed that while the stream count for that song went way up, my overall listener did not. Fishy sign #2: lots and lots of streams but not lots and lots of listeners. And fishy sign #3 was that this song did not see a bump in saves or playlist adds. Add it all up, and this fishy scenario is a botted playlist. Luckily, the playlist had an email address in the description, and I emailed it right away and asked them to please take my song off of it. Why? Because some slimy companies out there prey on artists who are desperate to get their music to new listeners, but really they put their songs on fishy playlists, and it’s mostly bots that are playing their songs. When that happens, Spotify often penalizes the artist as well as the playlist curator. I’ve heard of artists having their songs removed from Spotify because the song got put on a botted playlist, even though they didn’t ask for it to be there. Of course, artists can always contest that, but I didn’t want to deal with any of that. And thankfully I got to nip it in the bud directly via email. My song was off of there by the next day. Thank you, Mr. “rap city” Man!
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