Sun King Warriors rise again with hard-rocking 'Like a Light'

By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Like a Light” is the first album from Sun King Warriors in six years, and the first since frontman Jim Donovan went through a near-death experience.

With the song “No Time Dying,” the former Rusted Root drummer gets to express the emotional fallout of that 2019 bout with sepsis.

“I wrote it before I went through that ordeal,” he says, “and it was so weird because a lot of the lyrical content are things I ended up experiencing in the ICU, the sort-of nightmarish kind of experiences where I was really on the edge of not being here. The refrain of the song is, ‘While I'm alive, spend no time dying.’

“There was a point in the ICU,” he continues, “where, maybe it was a hallucination, maybe it was something else — I'm not sure. But there was this little voice talking to me, telling me: ‘Hey, you know, if this is too rough for you, you don't have to stay. You can go, you can be done with this life and everyone will be OK. You don't have to do this anymore; you've done plenty.’

“And that was the moment where it was like, ‘Are you [expletive] kidding me?! Absolutely not! I'm staying!”

In the hands of some songwriters, some bands, “No Time Dying” may have come off as a power ballad or something excruciatingly earnest. Donovan and the Sun King Warriors make it a big, crushing stadium anthem on an album that kicks hard just about the whole way through.

This is the third album from Sun King Warriors, which debuted in 2016 — 12 years after his departure from Rusted Root — with a few surprises for fans who followed his former band. Not only did Donovan step away from the drums, but he revealed hidden vocal abilities and a blues-metal swagger inspired by ’70s heavies like Led Zeppelin.

It was sort of in the works going back to the ’90s, as evidenced by “When the Rains Come,” a “Like a Light” song that wouldn’t be out of place on an Alice in Chains album.

“It was one that I wrote in 1999 and could never finish,” Donovan says. “It's one of the heaviest things that we've done and, back in 1999, I'm still in Rusted Root-land and it didn't fit anywhere. There was no intention for it. Rusted Root would never do that.

“I had a label deal of my own, on a subsidiary of Mercury Records called Triloka, but it was for, like, meditation stuff. I sent it to that guy and he's like, ‘Absolutely not. You need tattoos and you need some other thing to do this.’ It's funny how people in the industry think about things.”

Donovan never finished the song because he didn’t have a proper ending for it.

“Then, just this past spring, I finally was able to realize that it needed to be sort of a multi-part ending, like little mini movements.”

It also called for his voice to take a leap it wasn’t ready for, but that process was built into the formation of Sun King Warriors, consisting of guitarists Dan Murphy and Kevin McDonald, bassist Kent Tonkin, drummer Joe Marini and percussionist Bryan Fazio.

“The design of the experiment of this whole band was me being the least experienced [musician] on stage in my role,” Donovan says. “That was all on purpose, so that I would be pushed to get better. I've got all these guys that are just wonderful at what they do and awfully, awfully patient with me. So, that was part of it.”

The other part was him taking vocal lessons with former Pittsburgh musician Korel Tunador, whose resume now includes work with the Goo Goo Dolls, Rob Thomas and Katy Perry.

“We get online and he helps me tear it down and build it back up,” Donovan says, “and I literally practice every day, just to get my range expanded.”

You can also hear that range on “The Way You Shine,” the poppiest song on the record but also one of the most meaningful to Donovan.

“That's about a loved one who was going through some just really wicked mental health stuff,” he says. “It’s a song of solidarity where I want the person to know, ‘Hey, you don't have to fight the whole thing by yourself. I'm here with you. We're gonna take it on together.’”

Donovan climaxes the album in a comfortable place, back behind the kit on “Revival Drums,” a wild, hollering eight-minute percussion workout.

“Like Rusted Root,” he says, “we have a drum section of the show where I go back and play the kit and Joe plays percussion with Bryan. That was recorded live at a retreat that I run called The Great Rhythm Revival. We just caught a good one. We caught one that had all kinds of good energy in it. And I thought it would be interesting to put it on the end of the record as a kind of sonic sorbet.”

Those who chose to turn on “Like a Light,” produced by Sean McDonald (The Clarks), are going to be treated to a classic-sounding rock record that doesn’t let up.

“That was the goal,” Donovan says, “to make a record that I’d like to listen to now but would have liked to listen to back in the day when we were listening to all that stuff. Everything has not been done. The universe is infinite.”

Sun King Warriors will play a “Like a Light” release show at Mr. Smalls, Millvale, at 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $25 advance/$30 at the door; mrsmalls.com.