PREMIERE: Sonny & the Sunsets Share Their Sketchbook in “Someday I’d Like to Be an Artist” Video

The Sunsets provide an experimental soundtrack to the doodled thoughts of a teenaged Sonny Smith.
PREMIERE: Sonny & the Sunsets Share Their Sketchbook in “Someday I’d Like to Be an Artist” Video

The Sunsets provide an experimental soundtrack to the doodled thoughts of a teenaged Sonny Smith.

Words: Mike LeSuer

photo by Sarah Moore

March 13, 2019

“Someday I’d like to be an artist,” opens Sonny Smith—an artist who’s actively been putting out music as a solo musician and with his band Sonny & the Sunsets for over a decade—on the latest track from the Sunsets’ forthcoming Hairdressers From Heaven. Produced by The Shins’ James Mercer and Yuuki Matthews, and slated as the first release for Smith’s own Rocks In Your Head Records, the songwriter’s come a long way from the seventeen-year-old self he channeled to write “Someday I’d Like to Be an Artist,” a much more experimental number than his recent solo record would have permitted, featuring strings, recorder, and assorted intrusive sound bytes.

“I wrote this song imagining I was my seventeen-year-old self and I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t really know what that meant or how to do it,” Smith recalls. “And years later I came to see that all you have to do to be an artist is to make art. But back then I didn’t know, and it seemed like this mysterious thing, this kind of mystical power, and of course I romanticized it highly.”

Of the video—a series of crude sketches of promoters getting punched, among other, uh, cruder scenes—Smith explains its high-concept origins: “I had these kind of grandiose visions—I mean, like, a helicopter-shot zoom-in on seventeen-year-old writing in his notebook type ideas, stampede of horse hoofs as pen trembles in notebook kind of crap, big cinematic visions like that. But then as I was listening to my own song , I kind of caught myself and realized that was all a bunch of mind crap, and I just needed to make stuff, not big, ‘important’ art or whatever the hell that is, but the stuff you draw in your notebooks when you aren’t thinking about things. So this video is just some modest drawings and painting and messing around. It’s kind of a reminder to myself just to be real.”

Peep the vid below. Hairdressers From Heaven is out April 1.