Search - Sunshone Still :: Ten Cent American Novels

Sunshone Still* is the musical nom de plume for Chris Smith, a Nashville native now living in Columbia, SC. Since the 2005 debut release of Dead Letters, Chris was featured on the NPR program, All Songs Considered: Open Mic, and placed songs on the PBS series, Roadtrip Nation. Now, Sunshone Still returns with an ambitious 17-track concept album titled Ten Cent American Novels on Potato Eater Records. Inspired by Hampton Sides non-fiction book, Blood and Thunder, this historical character study centers around Manifest Destiny and the complex life of Kit Carson: his beautiful Arapaho Indian wife, his heroic trapping and scouting days, his brave military service, and his ruthless part in rounding up the Navajo Indians for the fatal Long Walk. Written in the form of a novel (complete with prologue, chapters, and epilogue), the grand ideas are expressed with big, eclectic musical interpretations and arrangements horns, strings, bells, organ and more. Contrastingly, the story s denouement is expressed in a quiet, sunset-on-the-open-range style acoustic guitar leading the way. *And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now Im darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be
-from Nick Drake's Place to Be