Ollie Byrd brings sweet low-fi listening with “The Sun Will Bring the Day Again”

Back when he was 18, Ollie Byrd finally got to date the girl he had dreamed of dating since he was 14. They were together for a few years, then not.

A year after the breakup, he wrote a song about it, a perfect kind of emo story. A couple decades later, Ollie produced it in low-fi with some rock guitar in the background and put it out as a soft, sweet, rockish low-fi emo track called “The Sun Will Bring the Day Again.”

The title does not appear in the lyrics.

“Yeah,” said Ollie. “I couldn’t bring myself to do that. It was just too sad,” he said.

And laughed.

“So, I thought it would be nice to have at least the title be optimistic.”

And I know
That you won’t be back this way again
And I know that these lyrics are cliché again

“Okay, so this song is about the loss of my first true love, about as classic of a topic as you can have,” he said.

“I had a crush on her since I was about 14. She was literally the girl of my dreams, and we had four or five years together. I think I took it for granted, and, of course, there’s the level of testosterone motivating a young man to do silly behaviors. Extremely stupid behaviors.”

In the background, Ollie screams:

I messed up

After the last line fades away,

Once we thought we had learned

The title insinuates itself into the consciousness:

The sun will bring
The day again

“It’s an older song, although it’s just now coming out, but it’s about, I think, acceptance.”

Ollie has been low-fi for a long time. He says that kids compare him to Alex G, who, he says, records in his bedroom.

“So that’s what the kids keep comparing this song to, and he has, like, 10 million listeners. I think he is the most successful I-record-at-home-guy that I’ve ever heard of. I started in 2004 recording at home. And now every kid records at home. Every freaking kid in America has an album.”

Ollie plays all the instruments and serves as his own producer.

He put out an album in 2006, Barrel O’ Fun, and it got a good reception. For a few years after that, he was touring with a band.

“It was a lot of work. I was sleeping on couches and being in a van a lot. It’s not glamorous.”

In the end, he decided that, though the album was popular, “It wasn’t enough to sustain a music business.” He went off the radar for a while, put out some music in 2012 and then pulled it down “because I thought it needed to be reworked.”

In 2018, his song “Couple Skate,” from Barrel O’ Fun, went viral on Instagram.

“I thought, ‘Hey, maybe there could be more to this,’ and I started working again.”

He still loves hard rock and over-driven guitars.

“People of a certain generation really love the over-driven electric guitar, and I keep imagining that someday I will abandon it. But I can’t.”

He has mellowed, though.

He is working on several songs now, acoustic, he said. For reference, he said he has become a fan of Nick Drake and his Pink Moon album and the acoustic solo music of Jeremy Enigk from the band Sunny Day Real Estate.

“I don’t feel so rocking at this point,” he said. “I don’t want to be 70 years old wearing clothing from Hot Topic and screaming, and there are a lot of people like that out there.”

When he originally wrote “The Sun Will Bring the Day Again” he was young, with a “very limited ability to compose music.” When he recorded it this year, years after composing it, he wanted to stick to the simplicity of the original idea, but he had learned a lot about music.

“I had become much better at composing music over the years, particularly, I added some flair on guitar.” He cites guitar — over driven — inspired by Brian Eno’s work on “Here Come the Warm Jets.”

“It really burnt up the gain on the board, and I thought it was awesome what Brian Eno did there. I added that as a little flair of something a little more complicated than the original vision, just to add something to grab onto.”

He added, “And I always love the electric guitar.”

“The Sun Will Bring the Day Again” is certainly simple. It may even be, as he says, “sickly sweet,” but then it was his heart throb and his breakup, so he would think that, wouldn’t he?

It is in actuality a cool song to listen to, with a lot of music for the ears to chew on, so connect to Ollie Byrd on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.

Amazon Music I Apple Music I Spotify I YouTube I Instagram