The Great Canadian Road Trip….Song #79/250: Steal My Sunshine by Len.

Sometimes life isn’t fair. I can say with great confidence that right now, as you read these words, there are super talented musical performers and bands who are all seeking their big break but, for one reason or another, the spotlight continues to elude them. These musical acts may spend their entire career never seeing a stage bigger than the one at their local Legion hall or coffee house. And yet, there may be poetry in their lyrics, starlight in their stage presence and magic in their musical stylings. Sometimes you can be as talented as anyone at the top of the charts and just not catch that one break that you need to change everything. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

And then we have the story of Len. Len is a band, sort of. Len is really what the brother and sister act of Marc and Sharon Costanzo call themselves when they are speaking to each other for long enough to produce some music. The Costanzo family grew up in Toronto. Like many siblings, Marc and Sharon experienced periods of close sibling connection, along with other periods where they couldn’t stand to be in each other’s company. Marc and Sharon had access to electronic music devices and would take turns dabbling with samples and beats of all sorts. In many ways, they were typical teenagers. They fooled around with music as a hobby. They partied with their friends. They went to clubs and concerts. Although music was a passion that both possessed, there was never a dedicated, organized plan made for becoming stars. The Costanzo siblings simply enjoyed music and the atmosphere in which music was performed and created. 

And so it was that Marc Costanzo found himself one night at one of Toronto’s first electronic music raves. It was a warm summer night. Strobe lights and lasers pulsated in time with the driving beats performed by the DJs in attendance. The warm breezes felt nice on his skin. The stars shone in the night sky. Everyone was movin’ and groovin’. There may have been some pharmaceutical stimulants which added to the blissful nature of the experience. All in all, Marc Costanzo felt at ease and at peace with the world. It was a moment that he never wanted to see come to an end. Consequently, as he lay there in the grass on that warm summer night with revellers all around him, he started to imagine song lyrics. He wrote key phrases and lines on his body with a ballpoint pen. Somehow, when he returned to normality the following day, the lyrics were still visible on his leg. He transcribed them into a notebook and called the work in progress “Steal My Sunshine”. Now that description may make it seem like something magical had just happened and this musical genius was about to get his big break. But that is not what was happening at all. What happened at the rave was not a musical epiphany for Marc Costanzo. Instead, recording the lyrical bits and pieces that he had was simply a way to remember another in the series of enjoyable times with his friends. The lyrics were recorded, tucked away and forgotten. It was something similar to the olden days act of keeping your concert ticket stub as a keepsake of a good time on the town.    

Because the Costanzo siblings enjoyed music so much and possessed friendly, outgoing personalities, they had no trouble attracting friends. Some of those friends turned out to be people within the Toronto music scene. For instance, Marc Costanzo was on social terms with singer Deryck Whibley, lead singer of the band Sum 41. Marc was also friends with Brendan Canning who was one of the founding members of Toronto powerhouse band Broken Social Scene. Canning was a musician but also earned a good portion of his income by being a DJ. It was in this capacity that he found himself with Marc Costanzo one night. Because Marc was interested in sampling music, Canning thought he might enjoy being exposed to some retro music that he may not have been familiar with. So, Canning played Costanzo some 1970s disco cuts including a hit by the Andrea True Connection entitled “More, More, More”. As Costanzo listened for beats or musical phrases to sample, he found one that caught his attention during the instrumental break, two-thirds of the way through “More, More, More”. As soon as Marc Costanzo extracted his sample, he knew that he had lyrics to match it that evoked a similar feeling to what he was getting from the Andrea True Connection song. As far as epiphanies go, this was as close to such a moment as Costanzo had. 

As he was polishing the song lyrics up, Marc Costanzo knew he wanted a song that was sung in the form of a dialogue. He patterned the lyrics to “Steal My Sunshine” after The Human League’s hit song from the 80s called “Don’t You Want Me Baby” which, if you are unfamiliar, features a dialogue between a man and a woman. For Costanzo, this meant having to become unshunned by his sister Sharon. He approached her with the idea for “Steal My Sunshine” in hand and excitedly pitched her on the male-female dialogue angle. Sharon Costanzo was intrigued and agreed to sing the female part during the song. As the Costanzo siblings managed to do throughout their on-again/off-again relationship, they rose to the challenge as a unified team when it came time to record the song for real. This song was not the first time the two had recorded together. In fact, the pair had recorded and released two complete Alternative albums by the time “Steal My Sunshine” came into being. Neither album sold well nor received positive reviews. It appeared as though making music and recording tracks was mostly for their own personal amusement. The track was recorded using Brendan Canning’s sample and with Deryck Whibley and a cast of dozens in attendance. The atmosphere was party-like. The song was recorded and then, just like the original lyric ideas, it was put aside and forgotten. The Costanzos were sitting on a life-altering lottery ticket win and didn’t realize nor expect it. They simply went on with their lives as if the act of recording a fun song was reward enough. 

Three years later, a movie was being made that starred Canadian actor Sarah Polley. The movie was called Go and was a drug heist movie that imitated the look of Quentin Tarantino’s classic Pulp Fiction. Go starred Polley, along with headliner Katie Holmes and a bevy of 90s up and coming actors such as Scott Wolf, Jane Krakowski, Jay Mohr, Taye Diggs, Timothy Olyphant and Melissa McCarthy (in her debut Hollywood performance). The movie did not do all that well at the box office but has become a bit of an underground cult classic in the decades that have followed. In any case, the song “Steal My Sunshine” miraculously came to the attention of the producers of Go who had been searching for a song with a good summer vibe to it. They agreed to include the song on the official movie soundtrack release and, just like that, everything changed for the Costanzo siblings. “Steal My Sunshine” was a huge hit and climbed the charts rapidly. Seemingly overnight, “Steal My Sunshine” found itself being played on famous Los Angeles radio station KROQ FM and being deemed as the song of the summer on air by KROQ’s DJs. That endorsement caused the song to sweep across North America and Europe. Soon, record executives came sniffing around. Large sums of money were being offered. Tours were being arranged. Pressure was being applied for the Costanzos to come up with the next “Steal My Sunshine” hit. Little did anyone listening to the song realize but the singers of “Steal My Sunshine” were just a couple of kids fooling around in their basement with beats and samples. There was no band. They were not musicians. They never intended to have a music career. And yet, here they were demanding….and receiving…$150,000 to go and shoot a video for the song. Marc Costanzo insisted upon full creative control for the music video and was granted it. The problem was that Costanzo had never directed nor produced a video in his life. Since “Steal My Sunshine” was a song about hanging on to the good feelings that come with summer parties, the Costanzo siblings opted to make the music video one big party. So, with a couple of dozen of their best friends, the pair flew everyone to Miami Beach during Spring Break. They had no permits. They had no recording crew. They simply went on vacation, had a blast and recorded it all. They drank so much while in Miami that legend has it they broke the hotel elevator after they filled it with all of the bottles and cases of booze they purchased. When the vacation party was over, the Costanzos handed over the video tape footage to the record company. The record company hired an editor to assemble it all. The end result is what you will see when you click on the video link below. I am willing to bet that a better time making a music video was never had by any other artist or band. The Costanzos knew that they had captured lightning in a bottle and were quite likely to never duplicate that success so they squeezed every last drop of pleasure from the process of having a song like “Steal My Sunshine” as they could.

There have been follow up albums by Len (which is the band name they chose when they needed a name for the music they were creating as brother and sister. One of their friends is named Len. That’s how deep the inspiration and symbolism lay).  Not surprisingly, none of Len’s follow up albums achieved any success at all. Len was dropped from their contract as the 2000s began. To Marc and Sharon Costanzo, their firing came almost as a relief. They never intended for any of this success to happen. Being portrayed as successful musicians put a lot of pressure on the pair. They had neither the skills nor the drive to pursue a career in music and yet, there they were at the top of the charts. It wasn’t magic that put them there but it was something of a sort. In the time that has followed the initial release of the Go soundtrack, “Steal My Sunshine” continues to be viewed as one of the quintessential songs of the summer ever since. It has been included in a variety of other movie soundtracks, as well as on television shows. Because of this, Marc and Sharon Costanzo have continued to earn a solid income through the royalties that “Steal My Sunshine” has continued to generate. That, in itself, it ironic because their use of the sample from “More, More, More” earned The Andrea True Connection a songwriting credit on “Steal My Sunshine” which, in turn, has provided Andrea Truden, the original singer and her producer/lyricist Gregg Diamond with a steady royalty based income as well.  The money has continued to flow in all directions and no one appears to have been working that hard to have earned it. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

The whole saga of “Steal My Sunshine” brings me back to the notion of luck and timing in the music business. There are thousands of people yearning to stand on stages like those of The Grand Ol’ Opry, Massey Hall in Toronto or Radio City Music Hall in New York City who will never see their dreams come true regardless of how hard they work or how talented they may in fact be. Their story reminds me of the closing lines of Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man”,

“It’s a pretty good crowd for a Saturday

And the manager gives me a smile

‘Cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been comin’ to see

To forget about life for a while

And the piano, it sounds like a carnival

And the microphone smells like a beer

And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar

And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?”

“The Piano Man” by Billy Joel.

Not everyone who occupies the positions at the tops of those charts does so because they are the only talented performers out there. For every singer or band who does top the charts, there are dozens, hundreds and maybe even thousands of others scribbling ideas into their notebooks, practising their chords until their fingers bleed and singing their hearts out in local pubs or while busking on sidewalks, all just one lucky break away from getting their shot. Sometimes life is like a lottery draw. There is one winner and far many more whose numbers never come up. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

The link to the video for the song “Steal My Sunshine” by Len can be found here.  ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the official website for Len cannot be found because there is no such website.

The link to the official website for the city of Toronto (where the Costanzo siblings are from) can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “More, More, More” by The Andrea True Connection can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the video for the song “Piano Man” by Billy Joel can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the video for the trailer for the movie GO can be found here.

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