Sunshine

Paced by the title track, one of Donovan's best singles, 1966's Sunshine Superman heralded the coming psychedelic age with a new world/old world bent: several ambitious psychedelic productions and a raft of wistful folk songs…

"There’s the simple fact that the band members were old enough and experienced enough by now to be virtuosos on their instruments (what other group—rock or jazz or any other kind of music—could boast a trio of spectacularly singular talents such as Garcia, Lesh, and Weir?) but were still young enough to want to play and play and play some more, the happy, itchy inclination of youth. As a few of the shows in the Here Comes Sunshine boxed set attest, it wasn’t unusual for a 1973 concert to exceed four hours. And within the shows themselves, there are nearly nightly examples of hour-long orgies of tune-linked songcraft and juicy jamming.

This one-off collaboration between the Cure's Robert Smith and Siouxsie and the Banshees' Steven Severin resulted in an eccentric, and at times incompatible, mix of psychedelic sounds wrapped around alternative '80s pop. Writers Smith and Severin's more eccentric tendencies are as likely to evoke pictures of a carnival as a funereal march, but the backbone rests largely on tightly constructed tunes with occasional forays into the experimental…