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It's a rare and privileged position to be able to talk about a song you love with the artists who created it. The song in question is “Highchair” and the band behind it is The Solid Suns, a rock trio based out of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Formed in the desert summer heat of 2011, The Solid Suns are Brian Keen on drums, Jim Campbell on bass, and Jon Gamboa on vocals and guitar. The band has spent the past three years learning to balance their own personalities and passion for making music with maintaining jobs and sustaining families. In addition to working out personal issues and resolving problems with each other, the band has managed to record two full-length albums, and has played a ton of shows – ranging from the House of Blues to the worst dives. It's an awful lot to manage, but the struggles that come with forming and sustaining a band are, Gamboa notes, “really fertile ground for creativity,” which is a statement beautifully born out by “Highchair.”
In the interest of full disclosure, Suns’ bassist, Jim Campbell and I are old friends, and while I want him to be happy and successful, the reasons why I love “Highchair” go beyond my friendship with Jim. I am not a musician, so I won’t attempt to describe what it is I love about “Highchair” as if I were. I can only say that “Highchair” – with its sense of movement that grows from beginning to end – resonates with me, and then do my best to explain why.
Gamboa starts the song with a gentle acoustic strumming that’s perfectly fitting for the child he seems to be softly singing to. Then Campbell’s bass and Brian Keen’s drums enter the room as metaphorical notches on a doorframe that marks the child’s growth. There is toddling progress, as the rhythm the band lays down gives the child, and Gamboa’s vocals and electric guitar something to move around in before guest violinist Nina Di Gregorio provides a further nurturing touch. The lyrics, repeatedly remind the child to “keep your love for the world,” but not just for her own sake: the protagonist sees the nature of his own relationship with the world wrapped inside this child’s eyes. If she can love the world, then, “maybe,” Gamboa sings, “I can love it too.” The music keeps pushing the child forward, encouraging her to walk, which she eventually does, but only after a brief struggle with gravity as the music pauses right around the two-minute-forty mark. This short silence gives way to Gamboa’s crunchy, loopy guitar playing, beginning an ending that repeats the song’s opening progression: guitar, bass, drums, violin. By the time the last note fades, our child is not just walking. She is soaring along with the band.
That’s what I hear when I listen to “Highchair,” but is that what the band had in mind when they wrote and recorded the song? I have a daughter, a fact that definitely colors what the song has come to mean to me. I’ve made "Highchair" about her growing up, and about my mission as a father to help her see beauty in a world that will, at times, show her unbearable ugliness. For me the listener, that’s how love and “Highchair” intersected to give the song personal meaning. The fact that my friend had a hand in its creation was just a bonus.
It’s this connection to Jim that gave me access to the other side of the exchange. Thanks to him, I could ask the band how “Highchair” came to be. What inspired it? I could explore whether or not the meaning I made from “Highchair” is the target the Suns were trying to hit. Jim put me in touch with Gamboa, the song’s principal lyricist. The story he tells about the genesis of the piece manages to overlap and diverge from the personal story I’ve read into the song:
Formed in the desert summer heat of 2011, The Solid Suns are Brian Keen on drums, Jim Campbell on bass, and Jon Gamboa on vocals and guitar. The band has spent the past three years learning to balance their own personalities and passion for making music with maintaining jobs and sustaining families. In addition to working out personal issues and resolving problems with each other, the band has managed to record two full-length albums, and has played a ton of shows – ranging from the House of Blues to the worst dives. It's an awful lot to manage, but the struggles that come with forming and sustaining a band are, Gamboa notes, “really fertile ground for creativity,” which is a statement beautifully born out by “Highchair.”
In the interest of full disclosure, Suns’ bassist, Jim Campbell and I are old friends, and while I want him to be happy and successful, the reasons why I love “Highchair” go beyond my friendship with Jim. I am not a musician, so I won’t attempt to describe what it is I love about “Highchair” as if I were. I can only say that “Highchair” – with its sense of movement that grows from beginning to end – resonates with me, and then do my best to explain why.
Gamboa starts the song with a gentle acoustic strumming that’s perfectly fitting for the child he seems to be softly singing to. Then Campbell’s bass and Brian Keen’s drums enter the room as metaphorical notches on a doorframe that marks the child’s growth. There is toddling progress, as the rhythm the band lays down gives the child, and Gamboa’s vocals and electric guitar something to move around in before guest violinist Nina Di Gregorio provides a further nurturing touch. The lyrics, repeatedly remind the child to “keep your love for the world,” but not just for her own sake: the protagonist sees the nature of his own relationship with the world wrapped inside this child’s eyes. If she can love the world, then, “maybe,” Gamboa sings, “I can love it too.” The music keeps pushing the child forward, encouraging her to walk, which she eventually does, but only after a brief struggle with gravity as the music pauses right around the two-minute-forty mark. This short silence gives way to Gamboa’s crunchy, loopy guitar playing, beginning an ending that repeats the song’s opening progression: guitar, bass, drums, violin. By the time the last note fades, our child is not just walking. She is soaring along with the band.
That’s what I hear when I listen to “Highchair,” but is that what the band had in mind when they wrote and recorded the song? I have a daughter, a fact that definitely colors what the song has come to mean to me. I’ve made "Highchair" about her growing up, and about my mission as a father to help her see beauty in a world that will, at times, show her unbearable ugliness. For me the listener, that’s how love and “Highchair” intersected to give the song personal meaning. The fact that my friend had a hand in its creation was just a bonus.
It’s this connection to Jim that gave me access to the other side of the exchange. Thanks to him, I could ask the band how “Highchair” came to be. What inspired it? I could explore whether or not the meaning I made from “Highchair” is the target the Suns were trying to hit. Jim put me in touch with Gamboa, the song’s principal lyricist. The story he tells about the genesis of the piece manages to overlap and diverge from the personal story I’ve read into the song:
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“Highchair” was written before The Solid Suns existed. It came to be about a decade ago. I was a teenager and just starting to deal with the depression and mental health issues that I would carry with me into adulthood. I was looking for any bit of light in the darkness. I found it in my little niece. She was just starting to walk and discover the world around her. It amazed me how differently she looked at the world. She fell in love with everything she saw. Every little thing was an experience to her. If she saw the world that way, why couldn’t I? What is it that we lose along the way?
I began to draw comparisons to the struggle of depression and fear to the struggles we face as infants. Trying to get on the other side of my problems was like relearning how to exist. Naturally, I put these thoughts to song like I did everything else at that time in my life. Music is and always has been a form of therapy for me.
The song asks her to hold onto her love as long as she can. If there was hope for her, maybe there could be for me too.
When we were putting tracks together for Lacunas, our second studio album, I felt like something was missing. It wasn’t a very positive listening experience. It needed a breath in the middle of the album. I decided to dust off Highchair and rerecord it. It was to be my opus, so we brought in an amazing violin player, Nina Di Gregorio. She really brought the track to life in the way I had originally envisioned it. (“Highchair”) definitely comes from a place of innocence. There’s a certain naivety that children possess that I’m envious of. As adults, we know too much about the world and how it works. Musically, it’s intended to capture that feeling of wonder and inspire hope. No matter how the song is interpreted by our listeners, my only hope is that it stands as a beacon of hope. |
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"Highchair," it seems, is the score for someone looking for that place where love, innocence, and hope live, which is exactly the way I want the world to be for my daughter. In the end, it seems that I heard precisely what Gamboa and the band wanted me to.
Header art by T. Guzzio. Original image via the Solid Suns.
CONNECT WITH THE SOLID SUNS:
The Solid Suns are currently writing their third studio album. In the meantime, they have just released a stand-alone single called “Flesh and Bone,” which you can hear - and download - below. The band is also getting ready for a busy fall show schedule and working on a few new music videos that will hopefully be out before the end of the year. Keep up with the Suns by checking out their website, and by following them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
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