Sunshine Superman is the first track on our 2025 cover tunes collection, Audio Dropouts, Vol. 2 (after the introductory WZEN (good morning) which is a tone-setter for the album). The song was written by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan,  and was originally released in 1966. The cast of session musicians on the song included pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, and the song reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

Pete suggested this one as a song we should cover, and he was right! We had a lot of fun doing this one and a highlight from the recording process was the face-to-face recording of Rich on 12-string acoustic guitar and Steve on 6-string. In a world of individual overdubs, it is always great fun to record together like that.

A few interesting tidbits about our recording:

       Steve found the sound used as the initial count-off randomly on the internet, without realizing that exact same snippet had been used on an album by Marble Feather, an earlier band of Rich's - imagine Rich's surprise on hearing that for the first time!  

       This is the first real feature of a fretless bass on a ZFB recording - the bass was a Covid-era purchase by Steve. Due to a near-catastrophic computer crash, we nearly lost the recording of this one (as well as some other tunes on Audio Dropouts, Vol. 2). We were able to recover the audio, but the drum programming went kooky and needed to be redone, as the assigned drum sounds had been randomly replaced by other sounds. There are little remnants of this that we kept in, as a memento of the crash. You can hear one, for example, at 3:13, where the high-hat is replaced by a metronome click sound, which would have been really annoying to hear throughout the whole tune!  

       Of course, the ending was lifted from the theme song to the 1950's Adventures of Superman TV series, starring George Reeves.

Credits: 

Pete: Vocals

Steve: Fretless Bass, 6-String Acoustic Guitar, Programming, Clapping

Rich: 12-String Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/2mYaVCICDWWb2dGzRFumEf?si=1441e2b30bb848c9

Listen on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/song/sunshine-superman/1790289605

Listen on YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=52ifH-Z-xIw

Purchase on Bandcamp: https://zenfusebox.bandcamp.com/album/audio-dropouts-vol-2