"Sunshine of Your Love" is a 1967 song by the British rock band Cream. With elements of hard rock and psychedelia, it is one of Cream's best known and most popular songs. Cream bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce based it on a distinctive bass riff he developed "almost in a fit of desperation" after working unsuccessfully all night on creating a song with his writing partner, lyricist Pete Brown who muttered "It's getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes". Guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton said in a 1988 interview that Bruce created the riff after attending a Jimi Hendrix concert. Clapton later contributed to the song, and drummer Ginger Baker plays a distinctive tom-tom drum rhythm. The song is sung as a duet with Bruce and Clapton trading the lead from line to line.

The song was included on Cream's best-selling second album Disraeli Gears in November 1967. Atco Records, the group's American label, was initially unsure of the song's potential. After recommendations by other label-affiliated artists, it released an edited single version in December 1967. The song became Cream's first and highest charting American single and one of the most popular singles of 1968. In September 1968, it became a modest chart hit after being released in the UK.

Cream performed "Sunshine of Your Love" regularly in concert and several live recordings have been issued, including on the Royal Albert Hall London May 2-3-5-6, 2005 reunion album and video. Hendrix performed faster instrumental versions of the song, which he often dedicated to Cream. Several rock journals have placed the song on their greatest song lists, such as Rolling Stone, Q magazine, and VH1. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it on its list of the "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll".

In early 1967, Cream were writing and rehearsing songs for a second album. Their December 1966 debut album, Fresh Cream, had been a mix of updated blues numbers and pop-oriented rock songs. Inspired by recent developments in rock music, the group began pursuing a more overtly psychedelic direction. "Sunshine of Your Love" began as a bass phrase or riff developed by Cream bassist Jack Bruce. Bruce tended to write songs with lyricist Pete Brown during the night as that was the only time they had to spare within the band's tour schedule. In 2009, Bruce's biographer, Harry Shapiro, wrote that "after one particularly difficult night" they were struggling to create something, when Bruce played "a riff of syncopated eighth notes all on the offbeat, almost in a fit of desperation", while Brown was staring out the window. Brown then got the line "It's getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes", which is used in the first verse. Brown, in a 2017 interview with Songfacts, gives a similar account, adding that Bruce was playing his old double bass from his days as a jazz musician.

Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, in a 1988 Rolling Stone magazine interview, told the story that Cream attended a concert on 29 January 1967 by the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Saville Theatre in London, and that "after the gig he [Bruce] went home and came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi. And then we wrote a song on top of it.

Music writers Covach and Boone describe the riff as blues-derived, using a minor blues pentatonic scale with an added flattened fifth note (or common blues scale). The song follows a blues chord progression (I–IV–I) during the first eight bars. Later, to break up the rhythm, Clapton wrote a refrain which also yielded the song's title. It consists of eight-bar sections using three chords, when the key shifts to the V chord (I = V):

A bootleg recording from the Ricky-Tick club in London before Cream recorded the song in the studio, shows "Sunshine of Your Love" with a beat common to rock for the period. Cream drummer Ginger Baker compared it to the uptempo "Hey Now, Princess", another Bruce-Brown composition Cream recorded in March. He said that he advised Bruce to slow it down and came up with the distinctive drum pattern which emphasises beats one and three (typical rock drumming favours beats two and four and is known as the backbeat). However, Bruce and recording engineer Tom Dowd dispute Baker's claim, which they say he only made much later. Dowd later explained

Where all the other songs that they [Cream] played were prepared, [but] this one song, they never found a pocket, they were never comfortable ... I said, 'You know, have you ever seen any American Westerns [films that have] the Indian beat, where the downbeat is the beat?' ... And when he [Ginger] started playing it that way, all of the parts came together and right away they were elated.