Close to the Edge with... Sunset Shimmer
Fodder's Ready
CLOSE TO THE EDGE WITH...
SUNSET SHIMMER
It's not often that the gods of prog grace us with exceptional talent this young, but 22-year-old guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Sunset Shimmer, the leading visionary of Canterlot-based proggers Sunrise, certainly fits the bill. Already beaming (if you'll pardon the expression) from the critical and commercial success of her last two albums, she speaks to Fodder's Ready about the band, their previous work, and what all of her fans (including all of us here) have long awaited: Sunrise's upcoming album, The World Spectrum.
Words: Crystal Clear
It should be no secret to the modern prog connoisseur that Sunrise could equally be described as 'The Sunset Shimmer Project' or, perhaps even more simply, 'Sunset Shimmer'. Some would say that, should one ever be lucky enough to enter the studio while Sunrise prepare another set of treats, a distinct air of authoritarianism à la Captain Bitheart would promptly fill the nostrils as the slightest mistake would be met with shaming screams that would drive the other bandmembers to tears trying to play the correct notes. So little is known about how the band functions, both on and off the stage, that it seems anomalous when one considers the sheer success Sunrise has enjoyed in the three years since their eponymous debut first hit the world. In this climate of uncertainty, the uninformed fanboy can only make wild speculations. But when I was lucky enough to enter the studio while Sunrise were preparing another set of treats, Sunset was eager to dispel the rumours.
"It's really an open way of doing things," she says as she tunes her guitar to a seemingly random set of intervals. "We get together a few times a month and I'll play them whatever I've been working on in between. We then just bounce ideas around the table just to make it a little bit listenable!" With a hint of seriousness she says, "I try my best not to starve them in my basement."
Indeed, watching the mutual laughter that erupted when fretless bass virtuoso Octavia played a note wrong was telling of the amount of collaboration that exists in the studio, despite how individual the final product seems to us lesser beings. She stresses to me how human all of them are, including herself, and that she feels no pressure to churn out new albums before they're ready.
"When Sunrise first started I used to take recording and band practice quite seriously. I was kinda stung from the experience of playing in an earlier band and I wanted to make sure we didn't make the same mistakes. I quickly realised they weren't mistakes at all, not really, so now I'm cool about everything and take things as they come. An airtight work ethic just brings the fun to a halt and you end up with the sort of music no one wants to make."
I put it to her that an approach like that makes Sunrise's explosive output (two 90-minute masterpieces with a year between each other? Wow!) only more impressive. "Well, we do what we can," she says with a humble but certainly not unappreciative smile.
Sunrise's supernova ascent to the progressive rock understanding of fame and fortune has not gone undocumented in these pages. The enthusiasm Roadtrotter Records had for Sunrise was the cause of much hype which, as the unprecedented sales and critical praise for the debut demonstrate, was not let down by amateur musicianship. A hugely successful national tour was followed by the release of their lavishly designed second album Your Faithful Student, whose concept dealt with the pitfalls of states of mind familiar to those who know what befell many of prog's early giants, namely arrogance and pretentiousness. It was a daring attempt, one that could just have easily suffered from the same issues as it criticised, but Sunset's tasteful and apropos sense of music and lyricism won Sunrise even more adoration from critics and proggers alike, even with the rocking 24-minute epic The Fault of Principality. There was no doubt in anyone's minds that the progressive rock community had acquired yet another fine jewel in its ornate crown.
But Sunset is adamant to take Sunrise's music one step further. "Looking back on it, Your Faithful Student was far more single-issue than I would have liked," she muses. "When I'm writing music I like to draw from my own experiences rather than make up imaginative stories; on Sunrise there was this dud track, Future Sense I think, where I tried to do that and I don't think myself or anyone for that matter found it convincing. I was reeling from that slightly when we started the next album, but I wasn't ready artistically to look at myself in any complexity, so it has an 'everyman' quality to it. That sort of thing sells, but it's not what I want to be remembered for. So one day I asked the rest of the band for advice and we came up with the idea to do something autobiographical. Immediately, all of us knew what we had to do."
To the surprise of both the record label and their newly acquired fans, the band forwent the opportunity to play a tour in support of their second album, choosing instead to work on The World Spectrum. "It was hilarious, actually. [Roadtrotter] insisted we do at least a handful of shows, but every time they asked we told them, 'No, we're working on the album. You know, the thing that earns you money.' They did eventually back off and let us do our own thing but it was a struggle at first. Like writing the album itself, as a matter of fact!"
TWSp (as Sunset prefers to abbreviate it, though I'm not too sure why) is another concept album, this time featuring a story directly inspired by her final year of high school. Among the many aspects referenced is a hard rock outfit named Dash, which at the time was considered Sunrise's rival. "It was a difficult time," Sunset explains. "Both our bands had a couple of our friends playing in them, which made the tension unbearable at times. It was just the fallout from the breakup of an earlier band. We had all been good friends for while before then and it killed, you know? Things just got worse from there and without giving too much away I'm glad to say it's all over now. Well, not all of it, but like I said all of us were in dire straits."
"There was one ground rule, however: for everyone's sake we could not under any circumstances reveal everything. Some aspects of the story had to be left out because of how, um, unique to mine and everyone else's experiences it was. Plus, isn't leaving stuff out what prog albums are all about?" She laughed yet again. "The trouble is there was a lot of debate among the band about exactly what that rule meant. Like, could we say x, could we say y, could we get away with implying this or that et cetera. It got quite heated at times, but it was only because we were all there when [TWSp's story] happened and we wanted to do justice to the whole thing for ourselves as well as for the fans. And not only them either! Everyone else who got involved in the mess too."
Sunset recalls the concerns of one such person who arranged a visit the studio back when recording started. "She was really concerned, because she came heavy out of it too, that I was just trivialising it, trying to make some money out of it, which is something I'd never dream of doing. So I invited her over so she could see what we were doing. From then on she was a kind of ambassador between the band and everyone else helping to calm them down about it too. In the end everyone was giving me the go-ahead and I thought to myself, 'You know what? Maybe this wasn't such a bad idea after all.' They were all very supportive which is great when you're doing something that's as new to you as this."
"If I had to say one thing about writing this album, the music was probably the hardest to write. On TWSp we've been trying to figure out a more evocative sound and it took a lot of brainstorming with the band to find a way through the mess of emotions and attain the sort of clarity you need to pull off something like that. I've always drawn from my own experiences but I've never really felt much connection between the notes and the lyrics in our last two albums. What's more, we had a lot of filler on both. So cutting that out and crafting a cohesive statement meant breaking bad habits and really going in to the songwriting process with a sense of naïveté and raw emotion; it took some effort, but I think we managed to get there in the end. In response to all the rumours about band politics, that this is probably the most collaborative record we've done yet. I couldn't have done it without the help of these guys."
So where does a meteoric band such as Sunrise go from here? Does its ambition increase exponentially with its success, or have they hit the magnum opus wall? "I don't know what direction we'll take next," Sunset says, "or even what our next album is going to be about. We haven't even talked to the label about touring afterward, which I'll admit is quite bad of me! But I'd say that a tour is the thing that'll follow most likely, and we'll see what happens from there. Whatever does happen though, and forgive me if I sound too confident here, TWSp will not be our swansong or magnum opus. You haven't seen the last of us and, rock and roll lifestyle permitting, the only way we're going is up."
Sunrise's new album The World Spectrum is out on 1st November via Roadtrotter Records.
