Sunshine

(1971)



I wrote ‘Sunshine’ in 1970 in probably less time than it takes to sing it. It was the height of the Vietnam-Cambodia adventure there in Southeast Asia. I was really saddened by that and really angry… It’s an angry young man’s complaint about what was going on politically and militarily in our name. I was knowing people that were coming back from the war and they were never the same – if they came back at all.

I had just undergone a really violent draft board pre-induction physical, where I ended up in an emergency room and ended up in a sanitarium I guess you’d call it. It was all in the interest of not going to Vietnam, but it left an indelible mark on me for life.

We were in Ohio and I moved my band to Cambridge, Massachusetts and Boston. I sat down on the bed and that song just literally came out. If the disc jockeys as they were called at that time had any idea what the song was about they wouldn’t have played it. They couldn’t have played it. It wouldn’t have been in their corporate interest to play that politically vivid song.

Jonathan Edwards, Alexandria Times