“When a song comes, I make sure I don’t let it go by,” says Joe Pernice. Sunny, I Was Wrong, his first studio album of new material under his own name, was born during a period of concentrated inspiration and productivity. Songs were coming almost more quickly than he could get them down on tape, as though they’d been waiting to pounce at just the right time. With a little help from his friends, Pernice fashioned a handful of them into a beautiful refinement of all the qualities that have distinguished him as a songwriter over the years: his facility for aching melodies, his penchant for arrangements that nod to pop’s past without getting mired in nostalgia, and a deep empathy for the characters who inhabit his verses.

Pernice has been catching songs for thirty years now, first with the alt-country legends Scud Mountain Boys and then with the indie-pop mainstays Pernice Brothers. In both of those groups he etched bittersweet stories out of songs that echo Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, and Paul Williams. He’s the rare artist who can record a Barry Manilow covers album that doesn’t drip with condescension or irony. With Sunny, the album gradually came into focus—or at least an idea of an album. “I knew I wanted to make a studio record, and I knew I wanted to make a record. I didn’t want just a hodgepodge of tunes. I didn’t want to make a concept record, but I wanted something that needs to be heard from start to finish. I wanted it to be a destination. An event.” Sunny, I Was Wrong tallies up all of those things that do get away from us: friends and lovers we haven’t seen in decades, old promises broken, cherished dreams forgotten, best-laid plans unrealized.