It’s taken Joe Pernice thirty years to release his first solo album, Sunny, I Was Wrong. Along the way he’s recorded with the Scud Mountain Boys, Pernice Brothers, Chappaquiddick Skyline, The New Mendicants and Roger Lion. None of which are exactly household names. However, what cannot be denied is the craftsmanship he has developed over that time. His songs are packed with an intelligence and beauty that is undeniable. Which is why the likes of Aimee Mann, Rodney Crowell and Jimmy Webb, all have joined him on this collection.
The deceptive simplicity of the opening track, ‘Peace in our Home’, establishes how Pernice can do so much with so little. For a track that’s an emotional kiss off to an ex, the song is so simple it’s easy to miss how devastating it really is, “There’ll be peace in our home when you’re gone.” Singing against the sounds of an acoustic guitar, he lets it be known how much better life will be, with “voices rising only in song” and “hands on each other, but only in love.”
Unraveling the mysteries of love to the sounds of a Wurlitzer and a pedal steel, Aimee Mann and Pernice offer mysteries that can never be solved on ‘Deep into the Dawn’. The two recount the sadness, stunned by the reality of it all. “Like the days would always be/ We lived because we’d only just begun/ All at once but by degrees/ I woke up to the stranger I’d become.”
Is love true or is sometimes the pain just too much? Pernice examines the situation on ‘I’d Rather Look Away’. Joined by Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake on vocals and featuring the work of Pete Mancini on guitars (electric, slide and 12-string), the heart break of possibly seeing an old love is too much to bear. “If you should see her when we’re out in town/ Please, don’t let me know/ I’d get so shaky and fall off the bone/ If I had to say hello.”
Merging songs with instruments and vocalists, Pernice seems to hit all the right notes. His wife, Laura Stein joins him on ‘Is It Serious’, questioning the possible end of a relationship, set to the smoky piano of Mike Evin. The trumpet of Josh Karp and Greg Kramer’s trombone, fill the second half of ‘Twenty-Thousand Times’ with a beauty as they examine the mystical fable of a relationship with a troubled woman. Finally, there is the elegy to life, ‘It Got Away from Me’, where the piano of Jimmy Webb leads to a lyrical couplet based on ‘MacArthur Park’ in his honor with Pernice singing, “I blew half my life on things I can’t explain/ Left so many cakes out in the rain.”
There are few writers today that can do what Joe Pernice does, from taking a single stanza and turning it into a song that not only toys with your emotions as he changes the tones and textures with each reading of the lyrics, to stripping bare the wiring of your soul. Sunny, I Was Wrong is a testament to the talent of an artist who fills each measure with meaning.