"Soak Up The Sun" comes off as a casual song about enjoying the simple things in life, but its really a rather incisive look at our reactions to climate change.
"We already knew what was happening in the environment, and yet everything that you saw on MTV was, Like, bling and Rolls Royces and girls, and it just was such a weird dichotomy," Sheryl Crow explained to People. "That's what inspired the song: looking over at MTV, like, 'Whoa, what is happening here?'"
Crow wrote this song with Jeff Trott, a collaborator on many of her hits, dating back to "
Everyday Is a Winding Road" and "
A Change Would Do You Good" on her second album in 1996. Trott came up with the idea on a flight from Portland, Oregon, to New York. He
told Songfacts: "I'm thinking this is really ironic that I'm leaving Portland being soaked in rain, and I'm actually going to New York to soak up some sun. I'm going to New York to soak up some sun. That's got a ring to it. That's kind of cool.
Then I started thinking about the sun, and I started thinking of these Beach Boys-style harmonies. On that five-hour flight, I had come up with the whole song completely in my head, not all the lyrics necessarily. I had a good chunk of the chorus of 'Soak Up The Sun,' but I had harmonies and everything all in my head, and I'm just having to scratch it down on a piece of paper."
The last line in the song is an interesting twist:
I got my 45 on so I can rock on
As Jeff Trott and Sheryl Crow started working on the song together, they started talking about the then-recent Columbine shootings, where two students went on a killing spree at their high school before committing suicide.
"We kind of carried that over into the song as the voice of Sheryl as a young teenager with a lot of oddball friends who can't really quite make out why people are the way they are," Trott explained to Songfacts. "There's a reference to 'I've got my 45 on so I can rock on.' The 45 on was like a kid with a gun, originally, and then we thought that's a little scary.
We were talking about Columbine and we're like okay I've got my 45 on, so I can rock on, like I can blast you guys. I'm going to blast all the people that are bugging me. That's kind of where we were at with it, and then we said that's just a little too... over the top."
The music video, directed by Wayne Isham, offers no hint at the song's deeper layers. It's very upbeat, with Sheryl Crow soaking up the sun on the beach and then playing a bonfire at night.
The video was part of a promotional deal with American Express. During the shoot, footage was also collected for an American Express commercial, which came out looking very similar to Crow's video. American Express helped pay the production costs, hoping that viewers would remember their product every time they saw the video, since it looked so much like the commercial. MTV does not allow sponsors to pay for videos, but because the card never appeared in the video, they didn't know about the deal and gave it plenty of airplay. Sting had a similar deal with Jaguar in his video for "Desert Rose."
"Soak Up The Sun" was the lead single from Sheryl Crow's fourth album, C'mon C'mon.
By this time she had banished any doubts that her breakthrough debut, Tuesday Night Music Club in 1993, was a fluke. Her audience was maturing, but so was she: Crow was 40 when C'mon C'mon was released. Thanks to airplay on VH1 and on all those at-work-listening stations, the song went to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, Crow's first chart-topper on that tally.
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Crow had some high-profile help with the backing vocals on the C'mon C'mon album. Liz Phair sang backup on this track, and Stevie Nicks sang on the title track and "Diamond Road." In 2001, Sheryl helped Stevie write and produce some of her album Trouble In Shangri-La.
The song's co-writer, Jeff Trott, was shocked when he first saw the music video, which completely dulled the song's edge and transformed it into a fun-in-the-sun surf song. "I thought, 'Oh my God, Sheryl's surfing. What the hell is that? It's not even close to what it's about.'
I think having Sheryl on a surfboard, being at the beach, is probably more palatable then having her in a trench coat shooting people in a lunch cafeteria. Not that I thought that that's what the song was, but my impression from writing it was that it was much edgier than what came across. The video of course is like, hey, we're having a holiday. We're surfing. We're catching some sun. Everything's cool. Strum acoustic guitar. Like, wow! That's not even close to what we thought it was about."
Best Buy used this song in television commercials to pitch their electronic consumer goods, conveniently ignoring the song's message of enjoying the simple things in life:
I don't have digital
I don't have diddly squat
It's not having what you want
It's wanting what you've got