What started as a dream to raise horses, ended with Sunny Whiting performing across the Philippines with her family.
Sunny Whiting has been involved in music since she was a little girl, but it didn’t become a driving force in her life until her early teens.
When she was eight or nine, Whiting said she wanted to be a veterinarian for horses. Whiting worked a lot with horses, and saw music as more of a hobby, hoping to someday have a ranch or a farm.
To buy her own horse, Whiting made a goal to raise a certain amount of money, and her mom agreed to pay the difference. She spent time babysitting, mowing lawns and doing everything she could to save money.
When she was 15, she had finally saved up enough money for the horse, had found one she really liked and was prepared to buy it. However, around that time her musical gifts were discovered. A talent scout noticed her at a competition she entered with her a capella group. The scout approached Whiting and said she wanted to teach her voice lessons.
The vocal coach was acting as an artist developer, setting artists up with the connections they would need to continue with a musical future.
Whiting reflected on how at the time it seemed like it wouldn’t work out, and she would have to use all the money she had saved up for her horse to pay for these lessons, so she decided to ponder the decision.
“And so I … prayed and I fasted, I did all the things and the Spirit was just, ‘You have to do this,’” she said.
Whiting had been preparing to purchase her horse, going over to visit it several times a week. However, she decided to call the owner, and tell her the decision.
“I … called her and said, ‘This is what I feel called to do’ and I … literally said goodbye to it,” Whiting said.
That decision led her into an extremely busy schedule. She would spend two to three days a week at her voice coach's house working with guitarists, going to group classes and recording studios, and being there until about 1 a.m. She also became certified to become a vocal coach herself.
“It … skyrocketed … my entire life into what I ended up doing because of that one little decision,” she said.
She then decided to pursue commercial music and now teaches songwriting at BYU.
She compared her experience of giving up one dream to pursue vocal lessons to a painting of the Savior facing a little girl holding a teddy bear, asking her to give the teddy bear because behind his back where she can’t see, He had an even bigger one.
She even mentioned how her Mom surprised her for a later birthday with several horses she had worked with when she was younger, and now her family has a horse boarding business.
She reflected on how special it was to see how sacrifices can come back around with greater blessings now.
When she began writing music with her family, she was pursuing music as a career, but her siblings weren’t. Her sister had an interest in starting a family YouTube channel, and they started doing a weekly YouTube video called, “Sunday Scriptures and Songs.” They began doing covers of songs on the channel, and it eventually turned into what they do now.
Whiting's grandparents own a nonprofit called, “Believe International” in the Philippines, which aims to aid students by giving them scholarships and providing them with teachings in values.
Whiting’s grandpa, Carvel Whiting, spoke of his experiences in going to the Philippines and creating this organization. He learned organizations based on proper values are much more effective than organizations based on corrupt principles.
“We’re not teaching a church, we’re teaching the principles of goodness,” he said.
In 2018, Carvel Whiting asked if Sunny could write an album about the values they teach in the organization, and she wrote a song for each value. The main song was titled, “Believe.”
In February 2020, right before the pandemic hit, she and her siblings toured to all the schools that were sponsored by Believe International and performed. She noted how they wouldn’t have been prepared for it had her family not been doing the things they had been at the time.
Once COVID happened, her family began to do YouTube covers of songs in Tagalog and in 2021 they had a video that went viral and got millions of views in a day. Sunny Whiting spoke of how it was all over the radios there, and they were quickly asked to do all kinds of interviews.
From then on, Sunny Whiting and her family got connected with a music production team in the Philippines, and they now write original music for them. In April, Sunny Whiting and her siblings completed their first tour separate from “Believe International," with their group Torch, touring all the way from the north to the south of the Philippines.
Sunny Whiting and her family continued to expand their music interests and started sharing their music on Spotify, and recently got a Silver Play Button from hitting 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Sunny Whiting’s sister, Hannah Whiting, reflected on the experience of writing with her family, speaking of their group dynamic. Sunny Whiting has focused on the music side. She helps get the songs down, and collaborate the songs with the team in the Philippines. Their mom helps with managing, Hannah originally was the director of the music videos, Chloe is the high soprano, and Belle, Zoe and Rockwell all sing.
“We all have something different and we’re creating something beautiful,” Hannah Whiting reflected.
Sunny Whiting continued to speak of how all the dots connected to lead them where they are now.
“We didn’t know where this was going to end up, but … it starts from a little dream and it just escalated into something else,” she said.
Their family uses the hashtag “#faithandfamily,” and their slogan is “bringing families to Christ, one family at a time.”
Sunny Whiting reflected how their song lyrics are about connecting and togetherness, because their goal is to connect families.
Finally, when interviewing Carvel Whiting, he spoke of the power of hope that is reflected throughout Sunny Whiting’s story.
“When you have hope. When you believe you can do something … you can achieve a lot more than you could ever do without that hope,” he said.