Sweetheart of the Sun

Background

Sweetheart of the Sun is only the fifth full-length studio album by the Bangles since the band's inception thirty years earlier. It came eight years after their initial reunion album, Doll Revolution (2003). That record had been followed by an extensive concert tour after which bassist Michael Steele left the group, and a lengthy period of readjustment ensued. The remaining trio tried out new bassists and toured sporadically. Eventually they focused on making a new album on their own – the process would take about two years to complete.

Credits

The band's musical credits are described in the album's liner notes:

The album was produced jointly by the Bangles and Matthew Sweet. Sweet had already worked with Susanna Hoffs in several musical collaborations.

Debbi Peterson plays acoustic guitar on "Ball N Chain" and "One of Two". Vicki Peterson plays acoustic guitar on four songs ("Circles in the Sky", "Lay Yourself Down", "One of Two", and "What a Life"), 12-string guitar on four others ("Anna Lee", "Mesmerized", "What a Life", and "Through Your Eyes"), and slide guitar on "Ball N Chain".

Bassist Derrick Anderson plays on all tracks except "Through Your Eyes", which features bass work by Matthew Sweet. The album also includes appearances by Greg Leisz on mandolin, pedal steel, lap steel and electric guitar, and Greg Hilfman on piano and keyboards. Sweet and session musician Jim Scott provide extra keyboards on "Under a Cloud", and John Cowsill sings harmony on "Circles in the Sky".

Compositions

Of the album's twelve songs, ten are original compositions by some combination of the three band members (with occasional outside collaborators, including the former Go-Go's guitarist Charlotte Caffey); three songs are credited to the full trio itself. In addition to new material expressly written for the album, some of the songs were selected from a trove of unrecorded songs stretching back many years; a few date back as far as the early 1990s. The album's two cover songs date back even farther, to the 1960s: "Sweet and Tender Romance" is a reworking of a 1964 single by the UK girl group the McKinleys, while "Open My Eyes" comes from Todd Rundgren's early psychedelic band, the Nazz.

Releases

The album was officially released on September 27, 2011. An expanded version of the album was released exclusively through Barnes & Noble stores and included acoustic versions of "Through Your Eyes" and "What a Life" as bonus tracks.

Reception

The album was seen by many critics as a successful reinvention of the Bangles' early musical style – "a beautifully sustained salute to 1960s-inspired pop". Writing in The New York Times, music critic Jon Caramanica remarked that much of the album feels "like mature takes on youthful ideas" and harkens back to the Bangles EP of 1982 and the band's earliest days. Similarly, Steve Pick of Blurt stated that "it sounds remarkably like what we might have expected a follow-up to All Over the Place to be".