“Sunshine /Trash /Sunshine trash.”
So reads the indelible chorus at the heart of the title track from the new album by Richmond-based rock band Paint On It. Be forewarned: Once you’ve heard it, you may never hear the word “sunshine” again without needing to complete the quick, six-syllable triplet, like Roger Rabbit risking it all to finish the “Shave and a Haircut” jingle.
Some of the most resonant musical moments come and go in a flash, lingering long after the sound waves dissipate. “Sunshine Trash” arrives at a moment in which Paint On It is dissipating, its members having decided to end a productive, half-decade run that yielded a trio of albums of succinct and exceptionally catchy songs. “It’s rock and roll,” says Billy Bacci, the group’s lead singer and primary songwriter. “It’s Big Star. It’s the Stooges. Make three really good records, and then it’s like, ‘Alright.’”
Paint On It evolved from the Billy Bacci Band, which Bacci started in 2019 with a straightforward goal: to make an album on vinyl. Drummer Drew Barnocky was the first to join up, then bassist Mark Moran, who looped in his guitar-playing brother, Matt, completing the core lineup that can be heard on the group’s self-titled debut, which landed in 2020.
Bacci was born in Staten Island, New York, grew up in Northern Virginia and moved to Richmond in 2013, drawn by enjoyable visits and friends who studied film at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s since grown to become exceptionally well connected in Richmond’s music scene; he’s an engineer at Jody Boyd’s downtown recording facility, Red Amp Studios, and he’s a member of the backing band for local Americana standout, Mackenzie Roark. He also played in a pair of locally beloved, now-inactive rock bands: the Wimps and Blush Face, the latter of which included Paint On It drummer Drew Barnocky.
Yet Bacci didn’t hit the ground running after arriving here. During his first few years in Richmond, Bacci felt stuck while playing solo and making home recordings. “I was kind of bummed that I couldn’t find a band,” he says. “I didn’t know how to do it.”
In addition to his singing and songwriting, Bacci is a gifted lead guitarist and keyboardist. (“His music theory is deep,” bassist Mark Moran attests.) But it took time for Bacci to develop key non-musical aspects of his creative toolkit. “In my bands in high school and college, I was kind of a control freak,” he says. “What takes the longest is emotional intelligence … These are humans, and everyone’s got ideas. It’s so much cooler when everybody is chipping in and contributing and changing the direction of the song.”
Painting alla prima
That’s just how Paint On It collaborates. The group has worn its creative ethos — a mix of trust, looseness and daring — on its collective sleeve from the beginning. The eponymous opening track on the group’s eponymous first album spells it out in no uncertain terms: “Tired of your hair? The hair that you wear? / Paint on it / A classic work of art? / Paint on it / Crazy wheel shopping cart? / Paint on it.”
Bassist Mark Moran felt that freedom from the start of his collaboration with Bacci, which grew out of this friendship Drew Barnocky and a fervent appreciation for the Wimps. “Even in the first few practices, I would throw an offhand idea out and Billy would be like, ‘Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.’ Obviously this whole project is Billy-driven. He is beyond prolific, [but] the collaborative effort has always been the centerpiece.”
In the studio, the band frequently adorns Bacci’s songwriting with instrumental flourishes generated, at least initially, to make one another smile. “It’s almost like, ‘How can we fit the silliest, most fun ideas into the song?’ Keyboard bits, guitar lines — if it’s silly, or it sticks out, keep it.”
Members even lift up one another’s mistakes. Hearing multi-instrumentalist Mara Smith recount accidentally hitting a wrong note at the start of a hotly anticipated gig, Bacci responds: “Isn’t it funny how the wrong notes are the best part?”
“I teach music and they really believe me now when I’m like, ‘It’s okay if you make a mistake,’” Smith says. “Some people have a really hard time, and I promise it’s OK. It happens.”
“That’s where the best writing comes from,” Bacci adds. “Sing a wrong harmony and you’re like, ‘Oh, cool. That’s actually gonna be the harmony.’”
Immaculate vibes at Matt’s
When openness and experimentation are part of your process, it helps to record in a setting where the vibe is just right. Paint On It has done its fair share of production work at Red Amp in the past, leveraging Bacci’s job there when mixing “Sunshine Trash” and, before that, layering extensive overdubs on top of the initial tracking the band did at Go West Recording for its second album, “Tales From Another Star,” which came out in early 2024.
When making its follow-up, the group opted to step outside the studio and back into the space where they’d been practicing: Matt Moran’s home, then located off Forest Hill Avenue near Granite Pool and Tennis. Bacci and Smith both called the atmosphere “immaculate,” citing everything from intentionality around the lighting and carpeting to projected video of baseball games and Bob Ross painting.
“We should just record the next album here” was the consensus Matt Moran remembers settling in after a couple of practices there. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t. Between all of us, we’ve got all the recording equipment necessary to do it.”
The first foray into recording there took place when the three Paint On It members who are part of Mackenzie Roark & the Hotpants recorded demos for Roark’s 2025 album, “Ghost of Rock and Roll.” “These demos are awesome. Let’s do the whole Paint On It album in that way,” Bacci remembers thinking.
At Matt’s home studio, without the pressure of a ticking clock they’d find at a studio where they were paying by the hour, there was plenty of space and time for layering and experimentation. Yet the pace actually picked up when recording “Sunshine Trash” compared to its predecessor, whose finishing touches applied at Red Amp took a year unto themselves. “Every perfect keyboard sound and every guitar sound, and writing — we kind of wrote the record in the editing process,” Bacci says of “Tales From Another Star.”
An album without anguish
The modus operandi on “Sunshine Trash” was the opposite. Bacci, who cites Pavement and The Beatles as influences, was especially struck by the window into the latter group’s creative process afforded by studio footage from the 2021 “Get Back” docuseries. “I was amazed at how they would write a song that week, they would workshop it together, they would hit record, and then it would be the version that made it onto the album,” Bacci says. “That’s kind of what we did with this album.”
“By the time we recorded this last album, in terms of musicianship and how we work with one another, we were used to each other’s process,” Mara Smith says. “It was just like, ‘We’re here, we’re doing it together and it just works without anguish.’”
“From setting up the mics and doing sound checks and testing the drums, getting all the levels right, the process is just so fun,” Matt Moran says.
“I really feel like we got away with something on this record,” Bacci confesses. “This was by far the easiest band record I’ve been part of.”
Recording was so seamless for Drew Barnocky that he had to double-check that he was there for certain parts of it. “You Don’t Look Back for Me,” for example: “I listened back to that song and I didn’t even remember playing it,” he says. “I actually was like, ‘Is that my part? Was that me?’ It was so spur of the moment that that’s my takeaway from it… It’s kind of like [when] you remember the gist of a conversation but you don’t know exactly what you said.”
“It’s concise,” Bacci adds. “The immediacy of this album with like the weirdness of this album — it’s short and sweet. No wasted time.”
Ten tracks in fewer than 30 minutes: It’s the kind of album you rush to restart, given that you can double down on all your favorite parts — from the title track’s infectious chorus to the rollicking, two-minute road novella, “West Coast Jon” and the sweetly sung acoustic closer, “Raggedy Bird” — without even an hour going by. As a closing statement, it’s a masterclass in leaving ‘em wanting more.
“I just feel so lucky to have collaborated with Billy,” Mark Moran says. “I feel like nobody’s writing music like Billy is locally that I’ve heard. It’s so simple and tasteful and deceptively deep. It’s like a ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ kind of thing.”
Applying a coat of varnish
Several factors contributed to members’ decision to move on from Paint On It. There’s the time demands of adjacent projects: Mackenzie Roark & the Hotpants for Bacci, Barnocky and Matt Moran; the Signature Move for Mark and the Wayward Leaves for Smith. Run-of-the-mill life circumstances also played a part, as did an appreciation for the shape of the three-album arc they’d just completed.
“We’ve done a little bit of everything we wanted to do,” Barnocky says. “We have this first album that I think really captured something in a bottle, and then the second album is fully produced — spent a lot of time perfecting everything — then this third album is back to the roots, truly DIY. I love that range.”
For Bacci, disbanding meant lifting the weight of expectation, something he felt acutely after all the effort that went into making “Tales From Another Star.” “It took a lot out of me,” he says. “I don’t really think it got much attention, and that bummed me out a lot. I was carrying baggage around. I didn’t even know it.”
Not having shows to book or specific goals for the rollout of “Sunshine Trash” has freed up the members of Paint On It to take stock of what they did accomplish in just a handful of years. For Bacci, spinning the band’s self-titled debut on vinyl when the test pressing arrived was one high point.
Mark Moran echoed other members by singling out the “Tales from Another Star” release show at Gallery5. “That was peak Paint On it for me,” he says. “Everything gelled so nicely with that show… For days we were all buzzing.” His brother looks back fondly on the time the band’s name became literal during a T-shirt screen printing day at Studio Two Three, and on the day during the pandemic when the band lugged its gear and a generator to Dogwood Dell to perform a pop-up show.
Smith’s fondest Paint On It memories start before she’d even joined the band. She entered the picture when she met Matt Moran talking about guitars at a coffee shop, then become his roommate after Smith and her partner relocated from the Museum District to the East End and Matt moved into an extra room. The house turned into Paint On It’s primary practice space, and Smith speaks nostalgically about being surrounded by the band’s music, which she helped make starting with the second album. “There were lots of jams and hangs,” Smith remembers. “We have a lot of very musical people in our lives.”
A blank canvas
In addition to the Wayward Leaves and some side work with the Prabir Trio, Smith makes music of her own in spiritual collaboration with tarot and astrology under the name Finfeather. “Sometimes really weird shit comes through,” she confirms. She’s working toward releasing a backlog of that project’s output. “One of my biggest goals in the next few months is to just start letting the imperfection show and just let that stuff go… There’s a lot of things that are irritating in this world but really good for songwriting.”
Count Billy Bacci in. “We gotta make that Finfeather record,” he says offhandedly. “Let’s do it in the next year.”
For Barnocky, one day from Paint On It’s half decade has proven exceptionally resonant. The drummer met his fiancée at the Sammich food truck on a Saturday when Paint On It was scheduled to play a gig. Matt Moran introduced the soon-to-be-married couple, who bumped into each other again that afternoon at a Richmond Community ToolBank event on Brown’s Island, then a third time at the show that night. “It’s kind of a funny, small-world sort of situation, but the Paint On It show was this real important moment for us,” Barnocky says.
Their wedding is just around the corner. “All of Paint On It will be there,” he affirms.
You may be sensing a trend: members of Paint On It lifting one another up, making plans and generally acting unlike a band that’s decided to call it quits. When speaking with the quintet for this article, ideas for future projects came up often. The three members who play with Mackenzie Roark have plenty of collaboration on the horizon. Both Bacci and Barnocky alluded to potential Blush Face activity in the future, and Bacci has a trove of Paint On It demos he’d like to release at some point. He’s also hoping to enlist members of the freshly disbanded group for a Stereolab-inspired album sometime next year — “something glitchy and bleepy and bloopy,” he says.
“It’s nice to put a bow on it right now, and maybe this is it,” Barnocky says. “But we are all so intertwined as friends that [maybe] there’s another time that something feels right and it comes back for however brief. Who knows?”
To hear and purchase “Sunshine Trash” and Paint On It’s previous releases, visit paintonit.bandcamp.com.
