Sunny Levine
California born artist Sunny Levine has an international reputation as a producer, but has finally decided to embrace his identity as a musician. He's taken his talent to create a musical diary - a love story gone wrong told through his first solo album, Love Rhino.
What exactly is a Love Rhino? Initially it was just an inside joke, a one off statement that grew into a metaphor about dealing with heartache. Rhinos are tough animals, thick skinned, imposing; a rhino with a broken heart would seem heavy, lumbering, and slow. Coping required charging through the hard times lugging a big upended world of emotions - and that's exactly what Sunny did.
On this debut Sunny Levine delivers a sparsely textured chronicle of love gone wrong. Levine took the classic "boy meets girl, they fall in love, it falls apart" story and set it to music – really good music. The late night confessional vibe of Love Rhino's lyrics harkens that of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Beck's Sea Change and Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear. Blending casual conversation, acoustic instrumentals, electronic beats, witty word play, mixed metaphors and sarcasm, Levine tells a story that has a beginning, middle and end, mapping his heartbreak with painstaking chronology.
Composed with an eclectic assortment of acoustic guitar, processed violin, horns, banjos, and lyrical references to boxing and horse racing, the albums style is loose and genuine. To pull it all together, Levine enlisted a little help from friends like Ry Cooder, Amir Yaghmai, Holly Palmer, and Joachim Cooder.
Growing up in Santa Monica, Sunny grew up surrounded by music. Most of the men in his family are musicians. His grandfather is Quincy Jones, his father is producer Stewart Levine (Simply Red, Joe Cocker, BB King, Dr. John, Minnie Ripperton, and Jamie Cullum) and his uncle is producer QD3 (Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube). Becoming part of the family business was just the next logical step.
After fronting the band Matta Haari, he decided to try his hand at production and found himself really busy working with a diverse cross section of artists from Mickey Avalon to Hugh Masekela, The Sylvias, and the upcoming album from Pete Yorn. Levine played a key role in the completion of Happy Mondays' first studio album after a twelve-year hiatus.
In between producing music, scoring films, and mixing records, Sunny was bitten by love. When the relationship faltered, he stitched together all his confusion and mixed emotions into a record. For Sunny, it was a time to grow. The album proved a step up from his earlier music, which he describes as "guarded, macho, cool-guy. This was a little therapy. I was stepping out of a vague safe place to be vulnerable and talk about very specific emotions. It's not cool to be all jacked up from love, but I had to go through it, and luckily it became a body of work and not just a broken heart." Love Rhino was recorded in stolen moments between other sessions resulting in a production that has a completely distinctive sound…raw, personal yet uplifting. But Love Rhino is anything but a sappy, tragic tale. Rather, it is about a journey through hardships to come out stronger in the end. And he does.
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