B-Side Guys

Jacob Ifans wrote “Sun Don’t Shine” while winter storms battered his caravan home, and the song carries that raw immediacy of shelter barely holding against the elements. His debut single reads like a meditation on absence, where weather becomes emotional barometer and repetition transforms into ritual.

The Welsh-born, Cornwall-based singer-songwriter builds his narrative around the simplest architecture—”I think of you” becomes both anchor and prayer, repeated until it achieves the hypnotic quality of rain against tin. Ifans understands that folk music’s power often lies in its refusal to overcomplicate longing. The lyrics move between external storm and internal weather with deliberate plainness: “The storm outside, quite alright / Rumble on, all night.”

His farming family background and caravan winter inform every line, grounding romantic yearning in physical discomfort and seasonal endurance. There’s something particularly Welsh about finding poetry in harsh conditions—the way “sun don’t shine, quite as fine / Without you dear, by my side” acknowledges that even diminished light carries value when shared.

Ifans’ influences—Cash’s conversational gravity, Rodriguez’s weathered romanticism, Cohen’s spiritual questioning—surface not as imitation but as inherited wisdom. Recording his forthcoming album Eve’s Garden on Hydra, Cohen’s adopted island home, suggests an artist serious about connecting with his literary lineage while maintaining his own voice.

“Sun Don’t Shine” succeeds because it trusts its central metaphor without overexplaining. Storm as emotional state, caravan as fortress of solitude, repetition as comfort—these elements combine into something that feels both ancient and immediate, like finding shelter in a song that’s always existed, waiting for the right winter to reveal itself.