By Scott Thomas Anderson <\/p>\n
Fourteen years ago, Shawn Peter started walking a creative gangplank, one that brought him along the full scaffolding of life in Sacramento and sometimes guided him to the darker substructures of its past.<\/p>\n
Both a historian and songwriter, Peter was determined to record albums that were musical journeys into the Capital City\u2019s soul.<\/p>\n
He did that for a decade with a specific lineup of musicians in The Ghost Town Rebellion. But after enduring a split with some of those collaborators \u2013 and the psychic shock of the pandemic \u2013 Peter began to reform his outfit around an evolving sensibility. That much is clear from the first single he released under The Ghost Town Rebellion since 2023 called \u201cLooking for the Sunshine.\u201d Tonally vibrant and rhythmically stirring, Peter\u2019s rock meditation gradually builds towards a cathartic horizon like a solar flare piercing a thunderhead.<\/p>\n
The video for \u201cLooking for the Sunshine,\u201d filmed at locations like the Tower Bridge, Curtis Park and Oak Park Brewing, currently has more than 147,000 views on YouTube.<\/p>\n
Given how it tapped a nerve, \u201cLooking for the Sunshine\u201d also became the title of The Ghost Town Rebellion\u2019s latest album. Its tracks were recently released on digital platforms as the band gets ready to put vinyl records on the market.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, The Ghost Town Rebellion is headlining an all-age show around the new song collection at Harlow\u2019s Starlight Room on March 13 at 7 p.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was an album that was really about moving forward,\u201d Peter acknowledged. \u201cA lot of those songs were written towards the end of the pandemic as a way of getting through my own depression about everything [that] was happening. Basically, it was about trying to stay positive through all the negativity that was going on. So, now it\u2019s great to see that a song like \u2018Looking for the Sunshine\u2019 is connecting with listeners. That is why I wrote it \u2013 to cheer people up.\u201d<\/p>\n
One newer member of The Ghost Town Rebellion who sings on \u201cLooking for the Sunshine\u201d is Sarah Volkov. In some respects, she\u2019s not new at all: Volkov was already occasionally sitting in as guest vocalist at shows and studio sessions with the band since 2017. She joined as a full-time member in 2023, bringing her voice to different tracks on the new album. One of Volkov\u2019s favorites is \u201cLove is Love.\u201d When performed live, that\u2019s a gritty, guitar-driven jam with layered harmonizing from Volkav and Peter and frenetic guitar from Paden Beecher.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I like about songs like \u2018Love is Love\u2019 is how much storytelling and depth that there is to all of it,\u201d Volkov reflected. \u201cShawn has done that for a long time through his songwriting about Sacramento, so it\u2019s just cool to help that continue on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another addition to The Ghost Town Rebellion is drummer Ryan Casstevens. He has played with the group since 2024, putting the drive behind its shows at Harlow\u2019s, the Shady Lady and Sacramento\u2019s annual Chalk It Up festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I like about playing in this particular band is that we\u2019re not married to any one type of genre,\u201d Casstevens said. \u201cWhile the songs on the latest album all work together, they have a lot of different influences. There\u2019s so much complexity to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Casstevens also designed the cover for the new album \u2013 the first time he\u2019s attempted such a feat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe song \u2018Looking for the Sunshine\u2019 was the inspiration for that design,\u201d he confirmed. \u201cWe were thinking about the energy and the message of it. You know, with everything that had gone on with the pandemic, we wanted to reflect this idea of finding the good out there, even when everything else feels like it\u2019s not so great.\u201d<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s appeal to optimism, and Casstevens\u2019 design capturing that, with be the thematic centerpiece of the band\u2019s upcoming show at Harlow\u2019s. Members of The Ghost Town Rebellion aren\u2019t strangers to that particular venue, though the fact that it\u2019s an all-age show welcoming entire families makes it unique.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve opened up for national touring acts at Harlow\u2019s before, so I think it will be fun for us to sort of take over that runway and introduce our new line-up,\u201d Casstevens stressed. \u201cI\u2019m pretty excited about giving this album some life as we start our next season of shows.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter agrees. While it may feel like a lifetime since the former iteration of Ghost Town headlined Sacramento\u2019s Concerts in the Park in 2022 for an ocean of people, he feels this new line-up is collectively building towards something important with its invigorated dynamic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe truth is,\u201d Peter admitted, \u201cI haven\u2019t been this excited about the band in a long, long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
This story was funded by the City of Sacramento\u2019s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento<\/a>. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, CapRadio, Hmong Daily News, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our \u201cSac Art Pulse\u201d newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Scott Thomas Anderson Fourteen years ago, Shawn Peter started walking a creative gangplank, one that brought him…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122,91023],"class_list":{"0":"post-194855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-sacramento","9":"tag-sacramento-headlines","10":"tag-sacramento-news","11":"tag-the-ghost-town-rebellion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}