As of one day later, the album is not to be found anywhere. So what do we know?
Sunlight was not a regular solo album. It’s only about 32 minutes long with its 14 tracks around 2 minutes each. Only the title track exceeds 3 minutes. These are relatively simple pieces, but Anderson’s voice rings true and there are some nice melodies, good playing. It’s not out of place among Anderson’s latter day solo catalogue, but it’s not as proggy or complex in its playing as, say, 1000 Hands: Chapter One or Invention of Knowledge.
But what is it? Why did it appear, and disappear? Jon Anderson posted to Facebook, "'SUNLIGHT' is not a solo album...FYI....it's music I made with a close friend for the Universal music library ...production music created for movies, advertising and other avenues...not a solo album..." This was apparent at release. It was the Universal Production Music website that had most details, and additional alternate versions of the tracks.
What is production music? Sometimes, a musician may be commissioned to do music for a film or TV, as Trevor Rabin does a lot. But with Sunlight and similar, music is written without any particular visuals in mind, but is then made available to be easily used in a production, with licensing arrangements all worked out. So you can search on the Universal Production Music website for different styles and moods of music. You’ve some film of a wooded glade: pop on the site and search under “Nature”.
Steve Howe did a couple of albums like this in the eighties and nineties: Guitar Player and Guitar Plus. Back then, these were very difficult to get hold of outside the industry. But, today, it appears Universal just dump copies of these sorts of release on Spotify, Amazon etc. as well as making them available as production music – because, I guess, why not? It’s a bit of extra income. That appears to have been the problem: the extra visibility wasn’t wanted.
But where does the music come from? Who is Anderson’s "close friend"? That would appear to be Jonathan Elias. Anderson first worked with Elias when he guested on Elias’s Requiem for the Americas: Songs from the Lost World, released 1989. Anderson then brought in Elias to produce the second ABWH album, which mutated into Union. Union was not a happy experience, with Anderson and Elias bringing in multiple session musicians to replace the actual band members, including Jimmy Haun on guitar. Members like Rick Wakeman, as well as many fans, were unhappy (you can read Elias’s side of the story here). However, Anderson and Elias have stayed friends and continued to work together. Elias has a company doing music for adverts, TV and film, including often employing Haun. Haun is an old friend of Billy Sherwood and his brother Michael, and currently a member of Arc of Life.
In recent years, Elias helped with Anderson’s 2011 digital release "Open". Around then, the two began a more substantial collaboration. Late 2012 and into 2013 saw sessions with Elias, Anderson, Haun and M Sherwood (who sadly passed away in 2019). The material was described as a mix of Anderson/Elias compositions and Anderson/Haun compositions. In January 2014, M Sherwood described what they had been working on: "here are some working titles to chew on.... The Given Love, The Remembering Gate, Children Yet To Come, Songs of Solomon and some nine minute orchestral thing which I think was called The Given Love part 2...They were all sounding so good. Also some Anderson collabs with Mr. Haun were taking place". However, the whole project had stalled by then.
In a February 2021 interview with SOAL Night Live, Haun picked up the story: "It’s so fucking great. The music is so good." He described how Anderson said the material got "a little too proggy for him [...] He was getting into something different at that point [...] He loved this band Battles [...] He was like, "Can we do something like Battles?" [...] Jon didn’t want to go down that road [progressive rock] again." (Anderson went on to guest on Battles’ 2019 Juice B Crypts album.) Haun continued, "I have these recordings and [...] God, I would love to, one day, be able to show people this stuff [...] Jon was very much a part of everything, and he was loving it, loving it, loving it. And then all of a sudden, it was like he changed his mind. And he wanted to do reggae and stuff. [...] But the music is there. So, I dunno, maybe one day he’ll be like "Let’s just do it.""
A couple of Anderson/Elias collaborations did pop up on YouTube: "Born Again" in 2018 (a version of a 2013 piece by Elias without Anderson) and "The Given Love" in 2020, a 9:46 track with a title matching one from M Sherwood.
Is there any connection between those older sessions and Sunlight? (I am presuming Sunlight was recorded recently, but maybe it wasn't?) The material on Sunlight doesn’t obviously match, but Elias and Haun are involved. We don’t know much about the material on Sunlight, but we have writing credits and the album has 4 pieces co-written with Elias and 3 co-written with Haun. Three of the other people involve (Zach Golden, David Ashok Ramani, Mike Fraumeni) all have past connections to Elias. This looks like an Elias project.
So why we can’t listen to it? My guess is Anderson and/or his people had it pulled. Either he didn’t realise that it would be available for general sale, or he didn’t realise it would attract attention, but it appears someone panicked and was concerned that this would damage Anderson’s reputation or distract from his actual next solo album, whatever that might be (1000 Hands: Chapter Two? Opus?).
While withdrawing the album from general release does solve that problem, we now have a situation where hardcore fans know something exists but they can’t get it, unless they were lucky enough to see the news about Sunlight quickly and buy a download. Of course, digital copies are now being sent round fan circles, as the album acquires a mythical status. It’s a shame a way wasn’t found to leave the album available, but to manage expectations around it.
