Songfacts®:

• This was written by Alyssa Bonagura, whose other credits include Jana Kramer's "Circles." Bonagura started the song when was studying at England's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, but only completed it years later. She recalled to The Boot:
  
  "I was in Liverpool, it rained all the time, and I kind of wrote that song as, like, a pick-me-up. I wrote the chorus, and I had it for years, and when I graduated college, I got a publishing deal, and my publishers heard the chorus from Garage Band … and he was like, 'Alyssa, you need finish this song,' and my manager at the time was like, 'You need to finish this song,' and I was like, 'Really? I just kinda wrote it for fun.' And they were like, 'No, really.'
  And so I finished the song, and, like, a month later, it was on a Lowe's commercial nationwide, and that was in 2012, and I did it all on my computer - produced it all myself, did everything."
• It was Bonagura's boyfriend, Graham Whitford - son of Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford - who was the cause of Steven Tyler recording "Sunshine." She recalled:
  
  "Apparently Graham sent a [different] song that I had wrote to Steven without me knowing … and Steven contacted me and was like, 'Oh my god, I love this song,' and long story short, he came to my show … and he heard me sing 'I Make My Own Sunshine' that night, and he walked up to me after the show, and he goes, 'Alyssa! Can you send me that song?' And I was like, 'Yes, of course I can send you that song!' And since then, we just became really good friends."