There is a version of Harry Nilsson that everyone knows — the one who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’,” the one who drank himself sideways with John Lennon during the Lost Weekend, the one who could make you cry with a three-chord pop song and no apparent effort. Sunflower is not that version. Or rather, it is all of that, compressed into something quieter and stranger than almost anything else in his catalog.
RCA released it in 1971 with essentially no fanfare, sandwiched between the more celebrated Nilsson Schmilsson era, and it promptly disappeared. Which is a shame, because it’s the one that sounds best at midnight.
The Room It Was Made In
The sessions took place at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, a room that had already absorbed Pet Sounds and Forever Changes into its walls. Producer Richard Perry was nominally at the helm, though “nominally” is the operative word — Nilsson was deep in a period of radical self-determination, and Perry’s job was largely to point microphones at a man who already knew exactly what he wanted to do.
The orchestral arrangements are by Perry Botkin Jr., who threads strings through these songs the way frost moves across glass — slowly, covering everything, not quite visible until it’s already happened. The rhythm section leans on Jim Gordon, one of the great underappreciated drummers of the Los Angeles session world, a man whose right hand could make a snare crack sound like it was coming from the next room over.
What Nilsson Actually Does Here
The songwriting is the thing. “Me and My Arrow” is almost absurdly simple — a ukulele-paced melody about a boy and his dog, animated by a cartoon, beloved by children — but Nilsson’s vocal sits on top of it with an adult melancholy that you don’t hear until the third or fourth listen.
“Gotta Get Up” opens the album at a pace that feels like someone narrating their own exhaustion in real time. It’s a two-minute song about commuting and disappointment, and it shouldn’t work, and it absolutely does.
What Nilsson understood, better than almost anyone working in that moment, was that a beautiful voice is most effective when it’s used against itself. He harmonizes with his own multitracked vocals on nearly every track, and the effect is less like a choir and more like a man arguing with his better nature.
The album’s most underexamined track is “The Moonbeam Song.” Structurally it’s almost nothing — a verse, a refrain, a held note. But there is something in the way Nilsson sustains the final phrase that makes it feel like the recording booth was actually a confessional.
Why It Got Lost
Nilsson Schmilsson came out the same year and had “Without You,” which became one of the best-selling singles of the decade. Sunflower had “Me and My Arrow” and a Roy Orbison cover and a song about coconuts. The commercial math was not kind.
But commerce has a way of sorting things incorrectly. Sunflower is the Harry Nilsson album you put on when you need the one that isn’t performing for anyone. The strings don’t announce themselves. The jokes land soft. Even the sadness is polite about it.
It’s a record made by someone who knew the music business was about to chew through him and decided to make something gentle anyway.
Put it on after the house goes quiet. Give it the volume it deserves.