Everybody Loves The Sunshine

What are those chords

For MusicRadar, I wrote an analysis of "Everybody Loves The Sunshine" to honor the passing of Roy Ayers. I have loved this tune for a long time, but I could never muster the energy to work out those chords until now.

I made a few halfhearted attempts at figuring out the chords and couldn't make any headway. Then I thought, this is crazy, someone must have transcribed this tune. As it turns out, many people have transcribed it, but none of the charts or explanations agree with each other about the chord voicings. I put the most plausible-seeming ones into a MIDI track in Ableton so I could compare them to the original recording, and none of them sounded exactly right to me. However, going through that process helped me zero in on the voicings I used in my transcription.

Everybody Loves the Sunshine – Roy Ayers

Next semester, I'm teaching a couple of semesters of NYU's new-ish Advanced Popular Music Transcription class. This tune is going to be a useful teaching example. One of the big challenges of popular music is that reliable sheet music, chord charts and guitar tabs are hard to come by. Officially published songbooks are not as accurate as you might expect, and they leave out a lot of information. Amateur transcriptions run the gamut from pretty good to ridiculously bad. Ultimately, if you want to learn a song thoroughly and accurately, you will need to figure it out yourself, or at least be able to critically compare whatever chart you are reading from to the original recording.

Another issue: Roy Ayers and his bands play the "Everybody Loves The Sunshine" chords differently every time. It's ultimately a jazz tune, and the entire point of jazz is to customize your arrangements on the fly. Any transcription has to pick a canonical version to refer to. With this tune, that's easy, because the studio recording is so famous, but there are plenty of songs where there isn't a single best-known version. We will get to that next semester.