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Blige revealed her emotional connection to Ayers’ signature song in her 2021 documentary, My Life: “I don’t know what’s in that record, but it was something in it that just cracked open everything for me,” she recalled. “That was the first music as a child that stuck with me because it made me forget that we lived where we lived . . . ‘My life in the sunshine’ was something I wanted.”
“It’s a tune that has instant recognition,” Cullum tells the FT. “But your consistent exposure to the song does not deaden its power. It’s definitely clever in its simplicity, as you find out when you start playing it. The song has one particular chord — a minor 11 — that moves around, with a voicing [arrangement of notes] that creates a really ambiguous harmony; it’s happy, but it also has an air of melancholy, and you’re constantly suspended in it. When I hear this tune, I kind of feel like I’m floating.”
Peterson tells the FT: “‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine’ is in many ways a perfect song. It’s deceptively simple in its motif yet constantly shifting and evolving; it transcends melody and harmony to arrive at the very heart of how it feels to be. Everything is in service of the story — not a note out of place.”
The song remains a captivating crowd-pleaser, and Ayers was never precious about its appeal. As he said in a 2020 interview: “Everybody gets in a happy mood when it hits the room.”
Let us know your memories of ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: Universal; Now-Again; Tommy Boy; Dtension; Hospital; Geffen
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