Sean “Slug” Daley will be the first to admit it. Following a night of hard drinking, the Atmosphere emcee found himself biking over to producer Anthony “Ant” Davis’ house to work on new music—extremely hungover.
It was 2007. Ant had only recently stopped punching a clock, working as a janitor at a Roseville, Minnesota, clinic; Slug was a new homeowner and they were both trying to figure out how to support themselves with music.
On the way to Ant’s house, he felt the urge to vomit, wrecked from the copious amounts of alcohol he’d consumed just hours earlier. With Ant’s encouragement, he started writing the lyrics to what would eventually become the song “Sunshine” off the 2007 EP Sad Clown Bad Summer 9.
Despite the rough start to the day, Slug managed to find the silver lining with lines like, “All of a sudden, I realized somethin’ / The weather is amazin’, even the birds are bumpin’ / Stood up and took a look and a breath.”
Ant didn’t see it coming, neither did Slug, but “Sunshine” blew up and quickly became a fan favorite and staple of their live shows. It was so popular, in fact, that Ant and Slug were approached by a group of students who wanted to shoot a video for it…eight years later. With the help of cinematographer Joel Schaeffer, producer Erin Gilchrist and steadicam operator Derrick Axtell, the solar-powered video came to life in 2015 and has since racked up more than 9.4 million YouTube views. The track also boasts more than 78 million streams on Spotify—their “biggest” song to date—and is certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America . Speaking to SPIN, the Rhymesayers Entertainment co-founders take us behind the scenes and explain how “Sunshine” came to be. Considering the political climate in our country right now, we could all use a little light.
Outside the Comfort Zone
Ant: We were heavily touring, and it was a very fun time in my life. I was a heavy drinker, but it wasn’t a problem…yet. It was still at the very fun stage of heavy drinking, and I had a somewhat single life. But career-wise, it still felt like, “Are we going to make it? How can I get any further?” That type of shit. I was still on edge and I newly quit my 9 to 5.
Slug: I was a new homeowner, trying to figure it out. I moved back, not necessarily into my old neighborhood, but not far. I was close enough to Anthony’s house to ride a bike to work in the studio. One day I biked over there because I was hungover and I was like, “This is the only way to beat the hangover is to sweat it out.” When I got there, I’m telling him about my bike ride and how at one point I probably wanted to puke. He’s like, “Write about it.” He always would push me to write about the things that he’s never heard anybody fucking rap about before. He showed me the beat and it was super optimistic and a little outside of my space at the time. I hadn’t really learned how to really get in touch with the side of me that is looking for hope, you know. It was all accidental, but it was all meant to be in that the stars just lined up to create this song. Even though you might be having a shitty day or, in my case I wasn’t feeling good, there’s still a bright side, there’s still a way to get through it by finding some gratitude, there’s charm inside of being grateful. He was pushing for that.
Bring That Beat Back
Ant: The only real interesting part of the story to me is when he would come over to the house, he would just start talking about whatever happened to him that day, literally, whatever was happening that day. Sometimes it was the mundane and blah, blah, blah, whatever, but this time he was talking about how he had too much to drink the night before, and he was like, “Man, I got on my bike and I haven’t rode it in a long time. I thought this might be a cure.” He was just rambling and I’m just listening. I don’t think it’s an amazing story. I never dealt with hangovers. That was never my problem, but he was really tripping on it. I was indifferent.
Then he was writing it and I thought it was fine, but I didn’t really think too much of it. The beat, too, didn’t seem as gentle as it does to me now. At the time, I thought I was making something a little more on the edge or something. I thought I was gonna add more to it, actually, but he liked it the way it was.
I wasn’t sure if it was the best thing we could do, but I thought it was good enough to be a placeholder and maybe we could figure out something later or something like that. That’s how that came to be, and it just grew on me a little. But we thought so little of it, we didn’t even put it on the album [When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold].
SURPRISE! Fans Loved It
Slug: When we did it, people liked it. It was cool but to us, it wasn’t a jam. We knew it was good and I had my brother Musab on the hook. The song ended up becoming kind of popular, which we didn’t see coming. That’s cool and all that’s fine, you know, a popular song is a blessing, but it can trick you into trying to recreate that blessing. Since then, I’ve been trying to be careful not to try to recreate that but instead search through the rest of my identity to find where hope lives. So here and there, we come out with songs that do speak to that. It started with “Sunshine” because before that, we didn’t really have a whole lot of those types of jams. After “Sunshine,” we make about two a year just because at least twice a year I feel hope.
Tattoo This!
Slug: I try to always perform it because it’s a tattoo. We have a handful of songs that inevitably I bump into people who have tattoos that were inspired by those songs, so I try to make sure that I nail the tattoos. There’s about six or seven tattoos that kind of stay in our set at all times. That’s literally the only reason “God Loves Ugly” gets performed.
Minnesota?
Slug: I didn’t want to put “Sunshine” on the proper album because I felt like it didn’t fit. It didn’t fit the narrative of the album that I was trying to make. That song technically was supposed to go on that album [When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold]. That album is a blue-collar story album, where “Sunshine” is very insular; it’s very about me. That album has very little about me. That album was me trying to make a Bruce Springsteen Nebraska album. Instead, we put it on the EP that came out before the album and it took off, and then we were all like, “Oh we should have put it on the fucking album.”
Eight Years Later…
Slug: These students asked if they could make a video and we’re like, “Shit, go for it.” The video took off and the song had a second resurgence. More than nine million views is pretty good for a shitty band like us. I loved it. The lead actor in that video is Naya, an old friend of ours, so that was cool that they put her in it. That video is similar to what I feel like when we are onstage because there’s a lot of room for things to go off the rails. I did like how that video felt like it captured a strong part of what we are as a band, weirdly. The funny thing is we had zero input, so it’s really interesting that they were somehow able to capture something that really spoke to me that well.
Ant: I don’t know exactly 100 percent how it happened, but from what I do understand and remember, there was an arts program or something like that. Some students made the video for extracurricular credit maybe, I don’t know. They made the thing, showed it to our people at Rhymesayers. We didn’t have a video for it and we knew that people loved the song but for us, it would feel weird to make a video so many years later. We just took them up on the idea, maybe because we didn’t have to do anything [laughs].
In Hindsight
Ant: It goes to show you that I don’t know what I’m doing. I never would have thought that song would blow up, but I’m extremely happy about it. If we would have thought that it was going to be that big, we would have put it on the album and made a better video. We would have done a lot of different things.
Slug: I wish I was able to glean something from that experience, to strategize and put together with what I’m working on now. If anything, that song pushed me to become even more hard to interpret. That song is very straightforward. This is not consciously, but if I were to really overanalyze Sean, I would say that the success of that song possibly had an adverse reaction in the sense that it really made me a little bit more cryptic and more unwilling to give it to you straightforward. I want to make you work for it.
If you look at a lot of the material since then, I’ve been playing around with how to go about communicating what I want to communicate. There’s another album called The Family Sign and on that album, I intended to write straightforward songs like “Sunshine” but ones that had hidden meanings. You’ll hear a song and it’s like, “Oh this sounds like it’s a straightforward song,” but really it’s not. It’s me forcing a bigger idea through the lens of a more straightforward song, so as we made Lemons, I did use some of that. I continued to write some more straightforward shit, but it’s like I have an agenda behind it. I guess in a weird way, “Sunshine” did inform me, but it possibly made me less pop.
Ant: I’m so grateful for the song. Do I wish we didn’t have to play it every single night, all my life? Yeah, it’d be nice, but I’m grateful to have the song. It’s our biggest song, so maybe there’s attention to it and the audience knows it’s coming. But the funny thing is I think the most diehard fans are more like me. They like it or whatever, but I don’t think it’s the end all, be all song. Still, it’s mandatory for sure.
