Songs of Sun and Rain

At this week’s rehearsal, Pamela Bowen, our manager/videographer, captured a couple more of the tunes that we are considering for inclusion in that new album we hope to start working on later this year.And, without our intending it, the two songs she videoed just happened to share the theme of rainy days and sunny days. That’s a hoot, even if it was unplanned.About the SongsThe first song on today’s “video extra” is The Flood’s take on Bob Dylan’s composition “Make You Feel My Love,” which debuted on Bob’s Time Out of Mind album in 1997. As we reported earlier, this tune attracted a celebrated following, with covers by Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, Neil Diamond and Adele.It also has a prominent position in “Girl from the North Country,” the Tony-award-winning musical that currently is touring the U.S. The play centers on the music and lyrics of 28 songs Dylan wrote over the past 60 years.The second song on Pamela’s video is Randy Hamilton’s treatment of the Bobby Hebb classic, “Sunny.” As we wrote earlier, the song that Hebb wrote on that cold November night in 1963 not only sustained his career for a lifetime, but has become one of the world’s most beloved jazzy anthems to optimism and joy. Its back story is fascinating.About the GraphicsBy the way, the graphics used throughout today’s video are products of Charlie Bowen’s new online toy. Have you heard about Google’s new ImageFX software?ImageFX is new standalone artificial intelligence image generator that Google released three months ago as part of its AI Test Kitchen. It creates graphics from simple text phrases entered at the prompt, and it’s all free. It’s a ball to play with. Just type in ideas for a picture and see what it comes up with. For instance, we typed in “heart drawn on a rain-streaked window” and got four variations on this:All the pictures used to illustrate the two songs in Pamela’s video were generated by ImageFX. But Back to the Songs….Back to The Flood’s studio project, this will be our first new album since Paul Martin put together Speechless in 2021, and it will be the first to feature our newest Floodsters, Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols.We’d love to have your help to planning it. Send us your suggestions — just drop an email to Charlie at [email protected] — and we’ll keep you posted as the work continues. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com