Hearts And Flowers - California Sunshine (1969)

Hearts and Flowers were one of the most eclectic 1960's Californian folk-rock groups, as well as being one of the very first to point the way toward country-rock. Over the course of their two Capitol albums, they blended folk, country, and rock with inventive sprinkles of pop and psychedelia on both original material and covers of songs by Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, Hoyt Axton, Gerry Goffin-Carole King, Kaleidoscope, Tim Hardin, and others. As was the way with many such innovative bands of the time, they were lost in the shuffle in an era when rock was expanding furiously in all directions. If they're mentioned at all by historians, it's usually because one of them went on to join a superstar group in the 1970's that played a far slicker variation of the kind of folk-rock pioneered by bands like Hearts and Flowers the previous decade. Though the band came very close to signing with Elektra, ultimately they went with Capitol, who released their debut album 'Now Is The Time For Hearts And Flowers', in 1967. It stood out for its low-key, countrified, acoustic-oriented folk-rock, in a period when the trend was to get louder and more psychedelic. 
For the band's second and final album 'Of Horses, Kids And Forgotten Women', there were a few changes, the most significant of which was the replacement of Rick Cunha with Bernie Leadon, and there was considerably more original material on the second album than there had been on the first. Neither of the Hearts and Flowers album made much impact, and the group disbanded shortly afterward, with Leadon going on to join Dillard & Clark, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and ultimately becoming a founding member of the Eagles. However, before the band broke up they had recorded an entire album's worth of music from several different sessions throughout their stint at Capitol, and most of them are more explicitly country-oriented than the songs that ended up on the official albums. One of the 13 tracks, 'Extra Extra', is simply a different edit of the track that closed 'Of Horses, Kids and Forgotten Women', using an excerpt of 'Ode To A Tin Angel' in the middle section rather than the slice of 'Rock and Roll Gypsies' that ended their second album, but the other twelve songs were all new recordings. With no band to promote a third album, the tracks were quietly shelved by the record company, but they did eventually turn up on the CD release of 'The Complete Hearts And Flowers Collection', and so I've extracted them from that set to give them their own release. If you know the band then you'll love these songs, and if you are not familiar with them then prepare to be impressed by one of the fore-runners of country-rock music.

Track listing

01 Rosana
02 Extra Extra
03 Walls
04 She Likes Her Loving Like I Like Mine
05 Six White Horses
06 Flower Lady
07 When I'm With You
08 Gypsy Blue
09 Everybody's Talkin'
10 California Sunshine Girl
11 Jones vs. Jones
12 Brandy
13 Other Side Of This Life