Sunshine Boys

We have failed at quitting. Our attempts at not playing together have fallen short. Our hopes of letting our music be all but forgotten have dried up. Which is to say, we have some shows booked for the coming months!

Friday, April 25th: Sunshine Boys opening for The Smithereens, featuring their guest lead singer John Cowsill at The North Shore Center For The Performing Arts in Skokie.
https://northshorecenter.org/event/smithereens/

Saturday, May 24th: Sunshine Boys with special guests The Webstirs at The Austin Community Tavern in Steger, IL. Is it a hike? YES (depending on where you live). But is it a great room/bar/restaurant, with fantastic food and friendly people? DOUBLE YES. And with musical dazzlers The Webstirs along, it's going to be a spectacular night of of bonhomie and big, bright pop sounds.
https://austincommunitytavern.com/

Sunday, July 6th: Sunshine Boys and many others (including another Gerald Dowd sighting) on Day 4 of Fitzgerald's American Music Fest. Exact times to come, but have a look at the summer holiday madness here:
https://www.fitzgeraldsnightclub.com/american-music-fest/

We'd done a pretty good amount of work since forming in 2016; two acclaimed albums, a number of singles, and a busy performing schedule – including a pair of successful and rewarding spins through the midwest as the support act for Juliana Hatfield. Then COVID hit in 2020, and shut everything down, including the momentum we'd been gaining as a band. 

Freda's planned retirement from drumming was a long time in the works, but like everything else, that got delayed until the lockdown started loosening up and things got back to normal. We saw the release of our second album Work and Love in mid-2020 (our record release show at SPACE was epic), continued to play gigs as the world opened up, before playing our last show on June 23, 2022, to a sold out show at SPACE in Evanston. It was a powerful, emotional night, and it took quite a long time for that finality to sink in. It was a hard goodbye.

But it was Freda who, about a year or so later, pointed out a loophole in her retirement that led us to where we are now. She said to Jackie and me, Look, I've only retired from drumming, but that doesn't mean I can't play the occasional tambourine. Why don't you get Gerald Dowd to drum, and keep doing shows? Sweetening the deal, she added I'll work the merch booth, and a deal was struck. Luckily, Gerald was on board. And there it was, the perfect way to keep things going; honoring our past while also looking to the future.

And so we've got new songs, strong ones, with the inventive, musical power of Gerald's drums, not to mention his considerable vocal chops, aligning perfectly with what Jackie and I have built with our guitars and voices through the years of Sunshine Boys. Even in this new configuration, our instincts seem perfectly in synch, just as they did with Freda in the band. 

We're all excited to be performing again, and I'm happy to be writing songs for Sunshine Boys.
We'll see you out there!
Dag