Sixty-two years ago today, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was driving in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. As the motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza, three shots rang out from a window in the nearby Texas School Book Depository. Kennedy was hit twice, one bullet striking and passing through his neck and the second striking and passing through his head. He was declared dead at 1:00 p.m. CST.
Kennedy’s assassination rocked the nation, a nation that had pinned high hopes on the young president. In the aftermath of the assassination, the country descended into a decade of chaos, marked by the escalating war in Vietnam, Civil Rights protests, urban riots, and more political assassinations. It was an event that changed people’s lives; everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard that the president had been shot.
I was five-and-a-half years old in November of 1963, and the news reports of the Kennedy assassination are some of my earliest memories. I remember my mother crying as we watched Walter Cronkite deliver the tragic news on our black and white console television. I remember all the adults in my life seemingly shell shocked at what had happened. For days, no one laughed, no one smiled. It touched everyone, and deeply.
On the day Kennedy was shot, the Beach Boys were performing in Marysville, California, near Sacramento. After their set was over, Brian Wilson and Mike Love retreated to their shared room at the El Dorado Hotel. Still in shock from the tragic events earlier that day, they put their feelings into words and music. The result was the song “The Warmth of the Sun,” today’s classic song of the day.
As Brian later recalled:
“We didn’t think of it as a big song. It was a personal response. But it got bigger over time because of the history linked to it.”
On the surface, “The Warmth of the Sun” appears to be a song about lost love, with the protagonist singing “The love of my life, she left me one day.” Given the background of Kennedy’s assassination and the resulting national grief, however, the lyrics take on a deeper meaning:
What good is the dawn
That grows into day?
The sunset at night
Or living this wayFor I have the warmth of the sun
Within me at nightThe love of my life
She left me one day
I cried when she said
“I don’t feel the same way”
Still I have the warmth of the sun
Within me tonight
Musically, “The Warmth of the Sun” is full of harmonic surprises that reinforce the emotion of the lyrics. The verse starts out with a relatively normal C – Am progression, (I – vi), but then shifts to an Eb – Cm pair—the same relative chords but a minor third higher. This is what music theorists call a chromatic mediant, and is apparent when you look at the four chords as two related pairs. The chords within each pair have the same relationship, just with different tonal positions. (Plus, the Cm in the second pair leads up to a Dm7—the iim7 of the key—which then leads to a G, which is the dominant that pivots back to the root, C.)
“The Warmth of the Sun” was included on the Beach Boys’ album Shut Down Volume 2, which was released in March of 1964. It was also included as the B-side to the “Dance, Dance, Dance” single, which wasn’t released until October of 1964.
Despite its lack of promotion, “The Warmth of the Sun” took on a life of its own and eventually was recognized as one of the Beach Boys’ best tracks. It’s one of Brian Wilson’s most beautiful compositions, that’s for sure, and one that perfectly captures the melancholy the nation was feeling at the time.
