A B O U T

Our Day in the Sun chronicles the adventures of a real life DIY indie band in the late 2000s. Based on a true story of ambition, demise and redemption. A behind the music, band-diary from the unique perspective of a woman in the predominantly male music industry, akin to Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl.

From the obsessive mantras of grabbing for a dream to the restorative mantras of the post-grievous, Our Day in the Sun begins with a chance meeting of a group of musicians and follows them through their courtship and eventual musical marriage. It recounts the shambolic adventures touring and on the road from 2008-2011 at the band’s peak, trying to make it as musicians in the ever-shifting DIY internet age of music, management, and promotion. It catalogs the struggles and hardships of eight musicians trying to make a dream come true -the doubts, frustrations, the ultimate deterioration of a team and the dissolution of a partnership despite the love and devotion of each individual to the other.

D E T A I L S

This 200+ page novel is the corollary to the album of the same name.
Written by Jen O’Connor, owner of The Kirk Estate + founding member of the band The Parlor.

Front Cover design by Eric Krans
Printed in the USA

E X C E R P T :

There was a spontaneous drum circle in the kitchen that got so intense Hank exploded a giant container of pasta all over the floor by accident and Carla found me slapping a gourd as it was all I could find to bang on. The room was filled with people playing kitchen utensils. Someone played the giant steel double-sink with a beer bottle, until it broke and so they finished the song with a butter knife. It was a riot of sound and texture and percussive tone made from jugs of olive oil and Pyrex plates, tea tins and garbage bins and nutmeg graters and slop from the compost bucket.

A man -the oldest guy in the place, but probably only in his mid 40s- jumped up onto the kitchen table and pretended he was surfing the wave. “Tonight we experience existence!” he kept shouting emphatically in his Casablancan accent. He was a homeless Moroccan immigrant named Omar, and a regular at Chernobyl.

“Too-night we ehxpehriahns ehgsistaunce! Too-night we ehxpehriahns ehgsistaunce!”

I slept in the basement in the exact same spot I had played. And in the morning on our way to find breakfast we saw Omar again on the street. “Waiht hehre!” he told us, disappearing for ten minutes. We debated how long we should wait before abandoning Omar, but soon he was walking back up the street towards us and handed us a boogie board he said he retrieved from a small locked shed on the street where he kept a stash of his belongings.

“I hohpe zees gehts you to whahre you wahnt to goh….baht rehmehmbehr…lahst night you ehgsperieanced ehgsistaunce!”

Read more examples of Jen’s tour/travel writing HERE