The chorus lyric of “Love Will Take Your Breath Away“ was written in 1993 and as Sun’s music career continued to fail to go anywhere it just lay dormant in a book while Sun acted out his personal version of Spin Girl Spin (see 100th Monkey) in the clubs. Numbing his inabilities and insecurities with unfulfilling day jobs, and party weekends, with the exception of “It’s A Smiley Face World” the years 1994 ’til well into 1998 saw little song writing come out of Sun’s disillusioned pen.

            Late in 1998 having made a half baked commitment to music once again and in need of inspiration to re-learn how to write, Sun began going through his old books looking for unfinished gems to polish and came across this chorus verbatim. “Wow” he said. “This could be a great chorus” and promptly wrote the first and third verses and the bridge. The whole song was originally intended as a ballad but Sun considered the verse lyrics he’d written too dorky for that, still he decided to hang on to the chorus and use it as a ‘fill’ for segueing between cuts. Somewhere in between all this the chorus melody got written and after a couple of different options the final one was decided on for the copyright.

            He didn’t know it yet but Sun was going to make a solo album and around the time he quit his day job in the spring of 1999 he went back to the studio with some new songs and had some sketch tracks done. Then the distraction of more unfulfilling day jobs and the inconvenience having to move side tracked this new direction. Late 1999 found him saying “Uh, where was I?” and back in the studio for more sketch tracks so he could begin to put a package together. Several of the songs he chose were older things that never got finished as song writing demos because they were deemed ‘not commercial enough’ or ‘not coverable’ (“My Baby Makes Me Feel So Good”, “Move On”, “Nowhere”). These were beautiful, lovable children being rescued from abandonment.

            As it began to gel and it was clear he wanted to tell a story with this package he decided to open the album with a lullaby version of the chorus of “Love Will Take...”. The two songs slated to follow were nixed when he decided that the album started too sad and though much of the story is sad, he didn’t want to begin it that way. He chose to nix the lullaby as well and open with “...Smiley Face World”.

            After putting the song sketches on a tape in the selected sequence and listening to it a number of times, Sun thought that ending the album with “Lavender Lane” was just too mellow. There had to be an overly huge spiritually uplifting exclamation point at the end of the story. He started going through lyrics after the millennium madness around the time he approached Dan Wise who he asked to produce early in January of 2000.

            The comedy of panic that ensued is familiar to us all. Like looking for just the right thing to wear for a first date and it’s too late to go shopping or make anything. There had to be something there in all those hundreds of lyrics that were gathering dust. Then in a folder for one of the young singers he’d recently started working with he came across the full lyric of “Love Will Take...” and said “Gee, I bet this could be uptempo” and with an Archies approach in mind voila, the uptempo version was born.

            Having to provide Dan with reference material Sun dove into his Archies, Andy Kim and other various and sundry Jeff Barry or Phil Spector productions (including Robin McNamara’s delicious lost to oldies radio (and barely at that) classic “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”). After listening to all the inspirational material Sun still thought there was not enough going on and added the “Ooh la la’s”. A couple of days later he decided the first verse was too short and added a second one before the first chorus.

            Work was scheduled to begin on February 11th and since there was no sketch of this song yet, Dan and Sun would be starting with it. Sun still felt incomplete about the song and while singing it and envisioning the “biggest dorkiest love letter to The Archies ever” and dancing around his apartment to just the melody he came up with the ‘love’ll take you higher’s’ & ‘up up away up’s’ and added an additional key change the day before his birthday...just four days before beginning production. Regarding this additional key change Garry Rindfuss who brilliantly mixed the record said that “real music people find key changes like that vulgar.” Sun’s response was, “Perfect.”

            In the notes to Dan, Sun said he wanted it to be “like getting hit in the head with a candy and glitter coated two by four.” I think he succeeded!