Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CCXXXVII--Forest Sun: Change My Tune

This week we have another tune I discovered thanks to the wonders of clicking on the Folk genre in Pandora (I posted songs by Chatham County Line and Kane, Welch, and Kaplin earlier this year).  If they'd had Pandora when I was still young and carefree I'd probably have ten thousand albums in my collection...

Though I am well over halfway through my fifth year of Friday Night Jukebox, I continue to be amazed at how many musicians can make a living playing music despite a complete lack of commercial success.  Forest Sun (his real name as he was christened Forest Sun Schumacher) is another such artist--born in New York, but our third straight Bay Area artist as he began his career in 1999 in my City by the Bay.  Over the last twenty years he's started his own label and released nine albums (the last in 2012), none of which have come anywhere near the charts.  He's released one children's album, played a fireman in the movie Who's There, and has added a song or two to three different movie soundtracks.  Forest is also a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, drums, piano, and an emaycee fave, the ukulele.  All in all he's spent the last twenty years making music and not slaving in retail, which is aces in my book.

Needless to say, "Change My Tune," which was released on Forest's 2005 LP Walk Through Walls, did not chart and we will not have a shout out for Billboard magazine this week (not that it needs one).

If ever there was a little ditty that was right up emaycee's alley, this one is it.  A Folk tune featuring some nice acoustic guitar, drums that sound like a washboard being played, a bit of accordion, and some fiddle, all filled with the effervescent vocals of Forest Sun.  "Change My Tune" is the promise of a man to his lady love that he's getting his shit together and everything will be different between them in the future...whether or not that's the case, only Forest Sun knows for sure.  It's short, it's sweet, it's catchy, and in a just musical world, it would have at the very least been a top forty hit.  As is, it's still a fine specimen of Americana:  a jug band recording a pop hit that will keep your toes tapping and your lips humming for days.

Lyric Sheet:  "The last song I sang you/I got the words wrong/Let me sing you another you can sing along/Gonna change my tune..."

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee