Sunshine Superman includes the song of the same name which helped Donovan to earn his title as a psychedelic singer, due to sunshine being slang for LSD. It was released in the US in 1966 and since then he has written many more albums.
Legend of a Girl Child Linda
The album includes Legend of a Girl Child Linda, one of many songs about Linda Lawrence, who Donovan was in love with. A lot of his songs were written about women, and in particular Linda, his first love and future wife. The song is rich in imagery and has beautiful lines such as “I will bring you gold apples and grapes made of rubies / That have shone in the eyes of a prince of the breeze”.
In this selfless line Donovan is infusing nature’s free fruit with the expense of jewels. As with many psychedelic songs there is a look back to a time of childhood innocence “On a hillside of velvet the children they lay down / And make fun of the grown-ups with their silly frown”.
Often Donovan includes birds to represent freedom, here he writes “from out of the sun a giant gull came flying and the children got ready to sit on its wings”. The children are free from the problems that the grown-ups face and their adult anxiety seems unnecessary to them, as in the ever influential Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Ferris Wheel
Some songs have autobiographical elements and Ferris Wheel is about a woman that Donovan met and described in his autobiography The Hurdy Gurdy Man, who claimed that she had cut off all her hair after getting it caught in a Ferris wheel. He warns “Take time and tie your pretty hair / The gypsy driver doesn’t care if you catch your hair in the Ferris wheel”.
Bert's Blues
This image of a seagull is again presented to us in Bert’s Blues with the line “Seagull flies across my eyes forever”. The seagull in his songs represents freedom. It is unsurprising that Donovan had such a passion for freedom when it was the root behind his whole philosophy of enlightening others.
Season of the Witch
Donovan felt that he was a true Buddhist, and mocks the fake “Beatniks out to make it rich” in Season of the Witch. He is making a comment on the falsity of people’s behaviour, noticing that there are “So many different people to be”, and so many different ways of acting.
The album was first released in the US in 1966. The original track listing is:
- Sunshine Superman
- Legend of a Girl Child Linda
- Three King Fishers
- Ferris Wheel
- Bert's Blues
- Season of the Witch
- The Trip
- Guinevere
- The Fat Angel
- Celeste
The release was postponed in the UK due to contract issues and was finally released in 1967 as a compilation of the albums Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow. It reached number 25 in the British Charts.
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