Other Peoples' Songs Request Line: The Sun and the Rainfall

Returning to Depeche Mode

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone for having thrown in their requests. I realize now that this is maybe not the best system for sourcing requests for a *single* song request — maybe in future I’ll figure out some kind of ranked-choice-voting thing (since that seems to be all the rage in Portland these days). But for now we have the current system, in which I look at the various requests in the chat/notes thread and feel, in turns, overwhelmed by the responses, guilty knowing that I will only pick one and thus disappoint the majority of people in the thread, and dismayed by the limitations of my own singing voice/playing ability. It’s a lot!

In any case, I happened to revisit the thread in the middle of the week and I saw that Aaron S. had requested Depeche Mode’s “The Sun and the Rainfall.” This is a deep cut, I think, by anyone’s DM fandom standards. But I remember liking the song so much when I was younger, when I was in the full flush of my Depeche Mode adoration. It’s the last song on their second album, 1982’s A Broken Frame. It was their first record without founding member Vince Clarke, who’d gone on to make music with Alison Moyet as Yazoo (or Yaz, as us Yanks got to know them). To my ears, “The Sun and the Rainfall” was always the third part of a song-suite that began with “A Photograph of You,” or at least that’s how the mix of the record seemed to present the songs: they were all strung together, connected by ambient noise between the tracks. It was a weird trilogy of songs, songs that seemed rather haphazardly sewn together, but it made a kind of sense to me. I particularly loved the final part of that song-suite in 1986 and I was excited, here in 2024, to reconnect with it.

Rather than do what was probably expected, to make a version of the song with acoustic instruments, I thought it would be worth my time to bust out the synth patches and the drum machines and try my hand at making a rendition faithful to the DM style. I don’t work in keyboards very intuitively, so I figured it would be a way to give myself a little challenge. And maybe I’d learn something along the way!

And so, my dear paid subscribers, here it is, my version of Depeche Mode’s “The Sun and the Rainfall.” Special thanks to Aaron S. for requesting it; it was lovely to spend a little time in this song that was so beloved to me as a kid.