“I know we can kind of have a sweet sound to a passerby, but it’s got some hurt, too, much like Philly has,” says Laura Colwell, frontwoman of Austin, Texas-born (but currently spread out) outfit Sun June, whose sound the group have long referred to as “regret pop.” Despite being officially based a few time zones away, Colwell has some strong familial ties to the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection: “Really, I’m a South Philly gal and I love it… but it’s been some time since I’ve had a proper Philly hang. When I go there, I’m usually with my sister and her three kids, who are little lunatics and I love them, so when I visit, it’s sort of like a relief for her [laughs].”
Sun June have played a handful of shows in the 215 over the past couple years. They headlined The Lounge at World Café Live in February of 2022, they made their first stop at Johnny Brenda’s last November, and they opened a free, family-friendly show for Vacationer at Cherry Street Pier on a Saturday evening this August with a somewhat volatile forecast. During a recent phone chat, I admit to Laura that I had to miss the show, and she tells me that seemed to be a common theme that night, due to the weather, but that the band enjoyed themselves, and it provided a particularly meaningful personal memory for her: “It was very fun. It was a cool space, right there on the riverfront, and Vacationer was great, and that was the first time that my nephew got to see me play. It was super special to see him right down front!”
The last time I spoke with Laura Colwell was just prior to the show at Johnny Brenda’s and shortly after the release of Sun June’s third LP, Bad Dream Jaguar, which came courtesy of Run for Cover. The band has been on a number of live jaunts over the past year, but when I ask Colwell about some of the highlights, her reply is charmingly simplistic: “Easy answer? You get to see old friends, getting to play entirely new places, like we just did what I’ve been calling the Jaws Tour, the Northeast corner of the country, with places like Maine and Vermont… It’s cool to see new places and meet new people.”
However, Laura tells me that the group has had a somewhat revolving lineup, which has kept things fresh: “We’ve had a few different versions of the band in the past year, so that’s fun… We’ve been rearranging things for different people, which is challenging, but it’s fun.” But she also admits that life on the road tends to be a little more mundane than fans like to imagine: “I mean, I get excited if everyone can get a good night’s sleep [laughs]. And I always ask fans for breakfast recommendations… But I’m on the road for a living, and some of the people work from the road, so whenever people ask me about tour, a lot of it is just being a tour mom [laughs].”
Over the weekend Sun June kicked off a little more than a week’s worth of East Coast dates with Friendship’s Dan Wriggins, who’s providing support and who Laura tells me is already a good friend: “I’m such a fan of him and a fan of Friendship; Dan is such an incredibly kind human, and an amazing artist and poet. I look forward to seeing him play every night! His lyrics make me laugh and cry at the same time…” The short run will see Sun June returning to Johnny Brenda’s this Thursday, November 21st, almost exactly a year after their last stop at the Fishtown venue.
Prior to Sun June’s Johnny Brenda’s debut, Laura joked with me that she hoped fans were prepared to listen to a lot of new music: “Get ready for the entire album, because we’re definitely doing that [laughs].” However, she tells me that this time around attendees can expect something a little different: “We’re gonna be dustin’ off some old ones. I wanna explore some of the ones we don’t really play live normally.” She admits, “It was important to play the record, because I didn’t know how many chances we’d get to do that. I always feel like that when we put out new music.”
And this fall has seen the release of a handful of new tracks from Sun June. Last month they premiered a remix of Bad Dream Jaguar’s “Easy Violence” courtesy of Porches (who also recently remixed a song for our phriend Daffo), which Laura tells me was beyond thrilling: “It was a total dream come true for us! We’ve been huge Porches fans, Stephen [Salisbury, Sun June guitarist and Laura’s partner] and I, for such a long time… which is kind of funny, because we first heard him through Sylvan Esso’s cover of ‘The Cosmos.’ I was supposed to go see him last night, but we’ve been shooting a music video for a new song, and it got late, and I’m just an old lady now [laughs].”
The video that Laura speaks of is for brand-new single “41 Dollars,” which dropped on November 13th (accompanied by Porches’ remix of “Easy Violence” and a demo of Bad Dream Jaguar’s “16 Riders”). “I just wanted to have a new song because people keep telling us we should release new music, which is a nice feeling to have that support,” says Colwell. The track, which the band has been playing live since this summer, was recorded remotely and produced by Dan Duszynski, who worked on the group’s last full-length. I ask Laura how the song came about, and she has quite the story…
“It’s a song about listening to men a lot, like when they talk at you… and drowning in someone’s own annoying habit of talking a lot, so maybe it doesn’t have to be about men… It’s a classic Sun June mix of bad guitar and good guitar blended together [laughs]. The bad guitar is me and the good guitar is everyone else… I hope it feels like a good bop. The dream was having this twangy bop that sounds sort of like Tom Petty, but if Tom Petty produced a Fleetwood Mac song. That was the dream!”
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