ALBUM REVIEW: Kendell Marvel Goes Right to What’s True on ‘Come On Sunshine’

When Harlan Howard first called country music “three chords and the truth,” he never could have predicted how those three chords would transform into something as ringing and rowdy as it is rugged and righteous. Kendell Marvel is the embodied version of a songwriter with a gift for finding the simplest truths in verse.

Kendell Marvel (photo by Laura E. Partain)

Come On Sunshine is Marvel’s third album, following 2017’s Lowdown and Lonesome and 2019’s Solid Gold Sounds, though his career as a songwriter in Nashville has endured for nearly a quarter century. Having written tunes cut and charted by Gary Allen, Jake Owen, George Strait, Jamey Johnson, and Chris Stapleton (among others), it’s only been in recent years that his own voice has represented the songs he’s penned.

The music most often sounds like ’80s country filtered through the 2020s schema of outlaw country — it is steady and flirts with becoming overly familiar — but Marvel, to his credit, maintains control over the songs with his voice. And what a voice he has.

He leans into the Hank Williams Jr. vibes alongside co-writer Chris Stapleton on “Don’t Tell Me How to Drink,” a song that takes an everyday behavior and asserts the importance of the freedom to behave however one wants. A common trope from across the last few decades in country music, it would be almost tiresome were it not for the song that follows it.

On the directly political “Keep Doing Your Thing,” Marvel follows a steady rhythm and slinky, sliding guitar, singing, “there’s more of us in the middle than there are left n’ right / more of us that wanna get along than wanna fuss and fight,” establishing the song’s narrative. The beat then picks up and his voice drops into a snarl for the refrain: “You keep doing your thing / and I’ll keep doing mine,” an admonition against policing others and a further celebration of what it means to be independent. Throughout the song, Marvel argues for the importance of letting people be exactly who they are. And while this is something of an oversimplification of the current zeitgeist, it is an incredibly welcome sentiment as much of the country continues to devolve into criminalizing and decrying the existence of some.

Marvel also dips comfortably into balladry, first with the half-painful “Hell Bent on Hard Times” though most powerfully with “Fool Like Me” (co-written with Waylon Payne). It’s a languorous lost-love lament with mournful pedal steel that builds to an explosive refrain built for singing along with lighters and beers in the air.

Marvel shares other well-cultivated sentiments throughout Come On Sunshine, including the title track, co-written with Devon Gilfillian. A song seemingly written to carry brightness to those of us stuck under the clouds of depression and loneliness, “Come On Sunshine” offers both validation and a shoulder on which to lean.  Ultimately, Come On Sunshine is an aptly named record that champions a balance between the freedom to exist and the love that comes with acceptance.

Kendell Marvel’s Come On Sunshine is out Sept. 23 via CmdShft.