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This album is in very heavy rotation in my player right now.  Copeland is an indie pop rock band from Florida — and that’s about all I know about them.  You Are My Sunshine is their fourth album, released on the Christian label Tooth and Nail, though the album has nothing remotely religious on them, which suits me just fine.  I found the CD in the dust bin at a local radio station — a secular station, in fact.

On the first listen, You Are My Sunshine struck me as just another Eagles/Beach Boys-inspired act, because of its stacking harmonies and high, falsetto singing.  But beneath the veneer laid something much deeper and personal.  The first three tracks — “Should You Return”, “The Grey Man” and “Chin Up” are all stand-outs, as is the cathartic “On the Safest Ledge,” but there are no weak songs in this 12-song collection.  The production is mature, understated and very consistent — doesn’t strike me as a hodge-podge gathering of songs but more like a uniform song-cycle.  I checked up on their earlier albums and it sounds like this soft pop/rock sound is a recent evolution for them, as the earlier songs sound edgier and come across more like a garage act, with more abrasive guitars.  Tinges of that are still apparent on this album, but it’s mostly a polished and slick affair.  But they do so without sounding sterile.

The main man Aaron Marsh pulls off something that’s very difficult.  First, his light and pure singing — very androgynous (look elsewhere if you’re looking for testosterone) comes across as very sensitive and emotional without sounding melodramatic.  And his lyrics employ fairly generic words, like love and pain and eyes-wide-open, yet none of the songs are shallow nor obvious.  When I try to write songs, I try to bring in exotic words to sound fresh and to camouflage its deeper meaning — but this guy does so with very everyday-language.  Yet its emotional depth is not diminished in the least, and even clichéd lines don’t sound so.

“Chin Up” is the album’s emotional center piece.  Stacked with soaring harmonies and lush strings, this is perhaps the most overtly dramatic songs on the set.

“With your eyes closed,
Watching a strange show play out in your head,
But you were smiling somehow.
And your day froze,
And everyone in it sat still as a rose,
But we were moving somehow.

Back to when we started losing who we were.
Maybe we should only tip a bottle back to keep us filled up.
Back to when we started losing who we were.
Everybody knows that you’d break your neck to keep your chin up.”

On the first listen I thought this was really melodramatic — the punch line about how you break your neck, simply to keep you chin up — the “chin up” gesture seemed too small for the violent “break your neck” image.  But then it occurred to me how true that is — meaning, how we go out pretending, trying so hard to present to the outside world that we are OK, when inside we are desperate and reeling in pain.  Keeping our chin up is such a small accomplishment for the heavy price we pay, the great extent we go to hide the truth.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek corny name like You Are My Sunshine, Copeland really pushes my “sensitive guy” button. It’s subtle and deep enough to withstand repeated listens, too, though the songs are fairly short, arrangements simple, and vocabulary un-exotic.  I highly recommend it to everyone who digs sensitive pop/rock bands with literary and insightful lyrics, like Toad the Wet Sprocket, Jars of Clay and Death Cab for Cutie.

Jars of Clay has always been an act I greatly admire but I don’t like.  I’m sure if I meet them in person, I’d be great friends with them.  And it’s not that I can’t stand their music — in fact, I really liked their first album, and their acoustic-studio hybrid “Furthermore.”  In the other words, when they try to play the role of generic electric rock band — I check out.

But I digress.  The song “Work” is a very big exception to my relationship with Jars.  I don’t just like it, I love it.  I have always loved Dan Haseltine’s insightful lyrics and everyman voice.  I usually don’t like what he does with his voice, but I feel like he struggles quite a bit with his narrow range as a singer — a struggle I very much share.

And this is one occasion where what he can do with his voice just really falls in place within the context of an electric band.  Being aggressive and insightful at the same time don’t come easy for most bands, so for this one, Dan went for the raw universality of loneliness, the debilitating desperation of it.  The fact that it’s in a weird key for guitars suggests they carefully had to place it in the right spot for Dan to go all out — and all out he does, in the cathartic climax. The fear of being alone isn’t exactly my personal deepest fear but I just can’t help being drawn in.

“When all the demons look like prophets
And I’m living out every word they speak.”

I like the punchline about the fear of drowning, too, but to me the most sobering moment comes from the lines above.  How many times have I done things, knowing they are wrong?  Fully aware that I shouldn’t do them?  The feeling that I hook onto this song sits right there — the fear of admitting that I am an uglier soul than I’d like to admit, being something I don’t mean to be, but can’t seem to help myself.  Feeling powerless to control my own behaviors.  If that is not akin to the fear of drowning, then I’m not sure what is.

Incidentally, the video they did for this song is also one of the finest ever, not just of theirs but of all the music videos, in my book.  It’s a hit-you-in-the-chest display of the band actually slowly submerged into water — from the muted colors to the manic expressions in Dan’s performance to the sheer technical brilliance of pulling off the whole thing in a single, unedited take, everything in this video lines up to make a gut-wrenching emotional impact.  Boy, what I’m writing really doesn’t do justice to the feelings I get watching from it.  The official clip on YouTube forbides embedding, but you can certainly watch it there.