For Li Mann of NY PodCat, the idea behind Sunshine Happy World began with something she heard on the New York subway. Surrounded by people speaking different languages, she started noticing how musical those languages sounded. What might have been background noise to someone else caught her attention as melody, rhythm, and expression. That curiosity eventually became the foundation for Sunshine Happy, an English language Dream Pop Dance track that grew into a much larger project featuring 13 languages and voices from around the world.
The idea had been developing for some time. A few years earlier, Li had translated one of her original Christmas songs into Spanish and found herself enjoying the process of hearing her own words transformed into another language. It opened up a different way of thinking about songwriting and made the music feel accessible to a new audience. Her experience also gave the project a deeper purpose. Li had been bothered by the way some people mock or dismiss languages they do not understand, and she wanted to create something that highlighted what she had always heard in them: beauty, rhythm, and musicality.
The music itself began with a much simpler moment. While working on a dance pop groove, Li looked out her window in early summer and noticed the blue sky, sunshine, and flowers blooming around her neighborhood. The scene sparked an immediate burst of inspiration and joy, an emotional reaction that she wanted to express and she felt the song in progress may be the right vibe. She returned to her laptop, wrote down some stream of consciousness phrases, opened the microphone, and began singing along with the track. What started as an instinctive response to a beautiful day became Sunshine Happy, the song that would eventually anchor the entire album.
From there, the project expanded far beyond its original English version. Li brought in Devin Malloy of Musiversal Studios to add beatboxing and give the rhythm more movement. After receiving positive feedback on the English recording, she began working through the translations and interpretations one language at a time. The additional versions were not treated as simple translations. Each required finding the right singers, recording their performances, shaping the arrangements with traditional musical references, and completing the mixing and mastering process. The full production of the 12 additional languages took roughly a year, turning what began as one song into an ambitious multilingual project.
Percussion became particularly important across several of the recordings, with João Paulo Drumond of Musiversal contributing to the tracks he participated in. The Swahili version offers one of the project’s clearest examples of how the music can interact with cultural tradition, featuring a call and response section rooted in African musical traditions. There is also a surprise waiting for listeners later in the song, adding another layer to what initially appears to be the singer’s inner dialogue. Those details give Sunshine Happy World reasons to be revisited rather than consumed in a single pass.
At its core, the album is built around a straightforward idea: one world, one sun, one song, 13 languages. Li Mann produced, arranged, played the electronic instruments, and sang on the project alongside co producer Peter Sawchuk, with beatboxing from Devin Malloy, percussion from João Paulo Drumond, additional singers from around the world (from A to Z: Alina W/German, Chiara A./French&Italian, Doroh Kendy/Swahili, Dorothy Takev/Bulgarian, Hyunju Lee/Korean, Marta Garrett/Spanish&Portuguese, Suriyha B & Taniya Ray/Hindi, Wulan Yuwanti/Japanese, Zirong L/Mandarin Chinese, Zeyneb/Moroccan Arabic), and Musiversal Studios musical engineer collaborators handling mixing (Dany Scheer, Henrique Vilhena, Taras Kuznetsov, Yago Marques) and mastering (Chris Cho, Federico Hencker, Luciano Vassão). The result brings Dream Pop and Electronic Pop together with World Music influences, using different voices and musical textures to make the same central idea feel different from one language to the next.
The story may not be finished yet. Li is already considering bonus tracks featuring additional languages. For now, Sunshine Happy World stands as the result of a simple observation that began in a crowded city: sometimes you only need to listen differently to discover that the world has been making music all along.
Stream Sunshine Happy World and follow NY PodCat:
Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and check nypodcat.com for bonus information and updates (Lyrics videos coming soon to YouTube).
Related Stories
From Punk’s Noise to Sacred Stillness, Ananda Xenia Shakti Makes “Devotion” Her Own Kind of Rebellion
Ananda Xenia Shakti’s “Devotion” connects her punk past with a quieter form of rebellion built around mantra, surrender,...
Eleyet McConnell Turn a Chance Encounter Into an Emotional Powerhouse on “Your Eyes”
Some songs arrive through careful writing sessions, notebooks filled with crossed out lines and hours spent searching...
Tammy Taylor’s “Life”: A Soulful Reflection on Loss, Gratitude, and the One Life We Get
Tammy Taylor turns personal reflection into music with her new single, Life, a soulful look at loss, gratitude,...