The Mourning Sun: A Music Career In 2 Minutes.
The Mourning Sun were a band from Texas who in 1967 recorded a single called “Let’s Take A Walk In The Woods”. That song is clocks in at a brisk 1:57. The band had access to a good studio and a talented producer (and one band member would go on to work in the music production biz as a career, so there was plenty of inspiration and talent from within the band as well). A little label called National General put it out on a 45 rpm single. There was a B-side called “Dark Hair” but that was apparently recorded in California with session musicians under the same name or something; in any event, it wasn’t nearly as good as the A-side.
“Let’s Take A Walk In The Woods” got some airplay in North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia in 1967. National General heard that there were more songs from that same recording session and asked the band to tour. The Mourning Sun probably would have liked to have done just that, but the band were all enrolled in college. There was a war in Vietnam on. They valued their student deferments. They told the label “We’d love to, but…no.” The label decided they couldn’t release an album from a band who couldn’t promote it, and so that was that. The band broke up, the guys went their separate ways, and such is life.
The Mourning Sun’s music career is all on that single 45 rpm record. 2 minutes.
Did the fellows in the band know this was going to be it for them when they went into the studio to record? They were clearly a very tight and creative group of musicians. Did they know at the outset that outside circumstances would conspire to give them a grand total of 2 minutes to document what they were all about? I don’t know. I sort of like to hope they had an inkling. “Let’s Take A Walk In The Woods” has verses that start off nice and explode into melodic full bloom. It has a fully-realized middle bridge. Coming out of the final verse they bring it home with a coda that all but demands continuous repeat listening.
With what time they had, The Mourning Sun did more in 2 minutes than entire bands who’ve piked around for decades have done across the span of dozens of albums. Kudos to them.
(That is not a picture of Midlake in that youtube clip.)
(Addendum: a little while back the intrepid music miners at Numero Group went through all of the studio tapes of the various bands in Beaumont, Texas that recorded around the same time as this recording and put them into a neat compilation which you can find here. There’s one other song by The Mourning Sun, but also a couple by other band members that are very similar. Worth checking out.)
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