Songfacts®:

• The dark side of the moon has been explored a great deal in music, the dark side of the sun, not so much, probably because the sun doesn't have a dark side. But José James saw a metaphor here. He explained on the Songfacts Podcast:
  
  "Lyrically, it's about this idea of the sun being all life-giving, all light-giving in our universe, but if you get too close to it, it pulls you in and it consumes everything. And for me, Black people historically in Western society have always been giving to society without reaping the benefits. So it's this idea of living in the dark side of the sun.
  
  Once I found that idea, that poetic idea, it opened up a lot of concepts for me. I'm a Gen Xer, so fame is always something that we look at. We're skeptical of it.
  
  And just the challenge of living as a creative person in this digital moment, this digital global society where we're more connected and we're also more disconnected at the same time."
• There's a lot going on in this song, with synthesizers and drum loops mixed with live instruments and hand claps. James produced the song using Ableton and beats from a J Dilla drum sample pack. "I'm fascinated by North African sounds and hand claps," he says.
• "Dark Side Of The Sun" was released as a single from José James' album 1978. The album was titled after the year of his birth. Many of the songs, like this one, are very personal to James, reflecting his mixed-race upbringing in a world that isn't always so accepting.
• The French rap in the middle of the song is by a Belgian rapper named Baloji. He and James met in 2013 and felt an immediate musical connection, but it took them a while before they could align their schedules and work together.
• José James is known for musically adventurous songs like this one. He released his first album in 2008 and, after a few years on the Blue Note label, started his own Rainbow Blonde Records with his wife, Talia Billig, who records under the name Taali. She wrote this song with James and Baloji, and also did the vocal and string arrangements.