If at first, you don’t succeed, perhaps consider reincarnation. “Mary,” the latest single from Sunnyside Uppers, is pulling vibes from ’90s alternative, ’00s indie, ’60s pop, but its more recent history goes back to an earlier iteration of the song released by the second iteration of the band.
“Mary,” describe by Sunnyside Uppers as a “classic tale of unrequited love and the toxic swirl in a sensitive young man’s brain,” was produced, recorded, and mixed by Adam Warren (waants), with Gavin Maclean performing on bass and, of course, the man, the myth, the affable yolk himself, Ryan Brown providing the meat and potatoes to the song.
“Haligonian indie scholars may notice that it’s a different configuration of the original Glory Glory lineup. According to rumour, I was the drummer,” points out Brown.
While Glory Glory made an amicable split half a decade ago, the former members have remained both friends and frequent collaborators.
“After Glory Glory broke up, Adam was getting into producing and we decided to collab on one. He picked it out of a folder of demos I sent. Not the one I’d have picked,” says Brown. “I just didn’t have a band, plan, or any other songs so we’ve been picking at it for a while.”
And that brings us to Beach Chair and the early demo of “Mary” that first surfaced in early 2020. As advertised, a rough version of the song appeared under a previous moniker of the band that was renamed to avoid being mistaken for a beer of the same name. “[I] didn’t want to go through ‘Glory Glory Man United’ debacle again,” explains Brown.
In that same spirit of “try and try again,” Brown says he wrote the song “the day after I met my now-wife and she wouldn’t give me her phone number.” Despite the song gushing with the absolutes of longing and the rush of teetering on the precipice of love, clearly Brown managed to turn the situation around.
Brown is currently working on more new material with Adam Warren and heading into Halifax next week to record vocals, so we should expect more Sunnyside Uppers in the near future.