Hey there! Well if you're here, it's because you're celebrating with me - 40 produced tracks from Great Highway. A major feat! Have a listen below, and read about my favorites.
My personal top 3:
#1. "Little Black Book" - I told Sarah when we first released Industrial Love Scene that this was the best produced and best composed song in Great Highway. Yep, and it has never been beat since. The lyrics are tight, snappy, every word is a piece of art. The synth and acoustic layers are in perfect balance. Sarah's vocals are perfectly intense yet understated. It's sort of like the perfectly engineered indie pop song. Even without the little finishing touches, like Sean's added-late guitar solo towards the end or the power tom drums banging in the background, it'd already be an amazing tune. I think we will top it - Sarah and the band are already cooking up some pretty phenomenal tracks in the studio for 2018. But let it be known that, as-of this date in history, Little Black Book is hands-down my favorite song in Great Highway.
#2. "The Dance of Thrones" - our funky electronica cover of the Game of Thrones theme song is an unlikely track to put at #2. But this instrumental jam is fucking magical. Everyone loves it every time we play it on stage, and for some strange reason it turned out amazing, like far more amazing than any of us expected. Adina's guest-star opera vocals, Sean's blistering guitar solos, my first saxophone solo in the band, and that driving relentless power-violin from Makiko. You must dig it!
#3. "The Chase" - The Chase is many friends' and fans' favorite song. I can understand why. Trendy snazzy EDM-style sampling with jazz and electronica elements mixed together underneath a sassy don't-you-even vocal solo by Sarah, possibly her best to-date. Plus, don't even get me started about that music video...produced by Sarah and Makiko and filmed at one of the band's favorite local SOMA bars, it's a whirling mad vortex of vintage-y steampunk-y costuming and makeup, over-the-top acting by the band and friends, it's just crazy fun. Maybe it wasn't our deepest most meaningful tune, which is why it doesn't rocket up to #1 on my personal list. But it's still a unique and special accomplishment. I don't think we have ever or will ever write another one quite like The Chase.
Honorable mentions:
#4. "The Venom In Me" - The Venom In Me remains my finest solo recording, and the best song I've ever written to make it onto an album. It's raw, powerful, potent. I'm not afraid to boast about it. I'm shy about most of my songs even to this day, but not this one. Most everyone in my life knows it represents the lowest point in my most turbulent romantic relationship, when a particular partner managed to rip me to emotional shreds and leave me almost ruined. It's also a tour de force of power synth, rippling exotic percussion, despairing acoustic guitar from Sean, and intense wailing harmonies from Sarah and Sean together. It's a beautiful and terrifying piece and I am PROUD. OF. IT. Now if only we could have had Makiko back in those days, instead of that synthetic violin...
#5. "Believe In Me" - Sarah wrote this beautiful piece about both the power and pain of isolation, of being set apart and incapable of deep connection with someone. It's a song that evokes both freedom and entrapment, the way that independence can create both problems and solutions to the hardships of love and life. It's also a fucking legit rock song, as badass as anything we've ever produced, with one of Sean's best guitar solos, power-harmonies from Sarah and Meredith, driving rhythmic layered violin from Makiko. Yup: badass.
#6. "Smoke" - Smoke is a fitting song on the countdown for this dark hour. It was written around a fictional bad acid trip - a girl is taking it for the first time with her boyfriend, and feels herself float away and then down into a pit of her worst fears, paranoias and panic. Her heart is broken open and she's forced to confront her darkest emotions. "I think I've lost my way, floating above the bed; and what happens to me when there's nothing left to hold onto?" An accurate description of the feeling of this week, month, year.
#7. "Satiated" - Satiated was really the band's first single. We had recorded an album before this song, but it wasn't promoted heavily like future albums were, and we didn't take any one song out of it and thrust it in the spotlight. Satiated sat at the top of our webpage and Soundcloud for a solid year, and became our first professionally-produced music video. It's a fun, horny little romp, a pure sex song. It was also the first full male-female duet in the band, which along with some of the still-used synth elements, made it a kind of marker for the future sound of the group.
#8. "Instant Crush" - without a doubt the best cover Great Highway ever produced, live or in the studio. We had covered other Daft Punk songs, as well as tunes by Hot Chip, Animal Collective, others I can't even recall at the moment. But when we packaged this tune and started mixing it into our original repertoire, we knew we had a major hit and a fan favorite on our hands. It is the first and only cover to this day that we've ever put on an album, and I'm really proud of how it turned out.
#9. "Tamed" - I love this song. It's a total departure from the usual Great Highway lyrical themes of love and loss, relationships, family. It's an outpouring of aggression and despair caused by my worst years working in corporate America, with a fictional tale appended to it of a man pining for a woman in his office that he has seen for years but doesn't know. The 3/4 waltz time and the dizzy descending piano give it the perfect touch of off-the-rocker two-tacos-short-of-a-combo-plate insanity, modeled after some early Radiohead and even a bit of Pink Floyd. We performed this live for years through various incarnations of the band, and while I'm happy to be pushing the newer stuff, I do miss this song a lot.
#10. "Empty Pages" - another song I recorded almost entirely myself, it was produced in 2013 but written long before that. It's a difficult song to play, with a lot of chord and key changes, so it was never a crown jewel in our live repertoire. But it's still one of the most genuine, raw and real pieces I've ever written.
#11. "Moving Target" - I'll never forget when a famous mastering engineer turned to Sarah and I in a sound workshop after hearing Moving Target for the first time. "You guys have really improved your sound," she said with genuine respect on her face. This song was the full realization of our target sound (no pun intended): driving electronic rock, heavy disco beat underscored by moments of pause and reflection, lots of great dynamic change and more of that urgency we also captured with Winter Snow. These two pieces are great companion songs and a testament to Sarah's delicate, carefully-crafted songwriting style.
#12. "Winter Snow" - one of Sarah's more recent songs, Winter Snow is a perfect indie rock song from start to finish. It has one of those lovely arcs of intensity, starting out soft and sparse and building to a crescendo, a reflection of the increasingly urgent lyrics around love and loss. I actually prefer the live version we do on stage in many ways - I think it conveys the energy of the piece better - but I'm a big fan of this recording, and I'm glad to add it to our forthcoming album.
#13. "Fly" - this track is special to me for a lot of reasons. It was the longest-played song in the history of Great Highway, performed at our very first open mic and then continually in our repertoire until August of 2016. It's also one of the only tracks I recorded entirely on my own in the studio, playing every part and singing every harmony. This was back when the original lineup was significantly less involved in the studio, before we had people who were heavily invested in songwriting and production and laying down their own musical parts. It's also dear to my heart and very personal, a love song to my dying grandmother, who at the time was semi-comatose from a bad stroke and living her final year of life. I said goodbye to her through this song, and though she likely never heard it, I think she would have loved it.
#14. "Light Up the Sky" - possibly the best song ever penned by our first female vocalist, Summer. It started out as a simple whole-note-chord piano line and a single vocal, then gradually expanded over time to the lush electronic soundscape that you hear on our very first album. It's written around the pain of feeling 'shut down' sexually and how body image issues and uncertainty in love can form a toxic mixture that can, left unchecked, destroy a person's sensuality. It's a brave song, staring down an issue that isn't talked about enough in music, and it's also sublimely orchestrated.
#15. "Far Away" - Far Away is our guitarist Sean's third song for Great Highway, and I think it's his best. Unlike "Get Up," which was written in overdrive to fill a needed single slot in our repertoire, and "The Current" which was a holdover from his earlier songwriting, Far Away feels like a truly innovative, made-for-Great-Highway piece. I love the juxtaposition of the upbeat verses with the sobering, more urgent and brooding choruses. I love the way the lyrics stay more or less light, but with a deeper undertone of darkness. There's references to intense loneliness, to alcohol at its deadliest, undercurrents of despair behind a simple yet pleading vocal. I've always been very proud to sing this song, and I think it's a jewel in our forthcoming 2018 record.
#16. The "Open World" Remix Set - this very special hour-long set was created for a gig we did hosting our first silent disco. It's a mish-mash of songs all the way from the first album to the latest, pulled together by a sweet disco beat and only occasionally interrupted by elements of acoustic rock or dubstep or jazz. I think overall I was never pleased with the production value; it was below the quality of regular songs I was producing back in that year, mostly because the size and scope of it made it difficult to keep that quality level up. But it's still a great track to put on at parties, and we've since adopted some of the remix material in our live set.
#17. "Get Up" - my guitarist Sean's first original piece for Great Highway. It was written to fill a void at the time of driving, upbeat 'happy' stuff; most of our repertoire for awhile was kind of a downer. I think we were listening to a lot of Imagine Dragons and Queen and stuff like that. We actually pulled off a pretty good power single with this one, though we never used it to promote the band. This was Emily's final recording before she quit the band, and when we brought Sarah in in 2014, we shifted to a more brooding electronic feel for our repertoire and decided to abandon Get Up. But I still love this recording quite a bit.
#18. "Twelve Days In And I'm Barely Here" - my ex-lead singer wrote this song on a vacation overseas, with an original demo that was pretty acoustic and sparse. She gave it to me loving the lyrics, which are about traveling away from a romantic partner you just met and how that can, well, sort of ruin the trip. But she didn't love the melody or the backing instrumentation. So I plumbed the depths of my favorite EDM up til that point, and made a remix based on some of the haunting yet clean and danceable tracks by an artist named Chicane. I still listen to Chicane to this day, and I'm proud to say we were pretty successful replicating that understated-yet-uptempo sound.
#19. "Page One" - the closing song of the 2013 album Ghost of Us. It's kind of a post-mortem of difficult romantic relationships, a representation of the melancholy and the long-term ache that gradually replaces the initial deep bite of a difficult breakup. It's one of the last dramatically sad tracks we've produced - our more electronic, driving upbeat sound has since been more about anger or cool reflection or just contentment. I would like to do another song like this again some day.
#20. "The Right One" - another heartache-y piece (seems to be the theme this round) penned in our first year as a band by ex-lead-singer Summer. We matched the stark, simple, laying-her-heart-bare lyrics with underproduced and minimal backing instrumentation, with the drum samples performed live using pads and no metronome. It's a rare raw and unpolished track, which at the time irked me but which has since made it one of my favorites.
#21. "Once & Gone" - this was the first track we produced in 2016, after the release of Industrial Love Scene. We're adding it to our forthcoming 2018 album Lenses, and looking forward to remixing it a bit. As it stands right now, it's a solid first effort with some great new production elements and a lot of really beautiful heartbreaking lyrics and vocals. We've since upgraded our mic set and I want to rework those vocals with Sarah later this year - I think that will bump this way up from #21 into maybe the top 10 or 15.
#22. "Among the People" - this highly conceptual piece featured something along the lines of 12 to 14 different singers in the ultimate ending chorus. I remember this song fondly because of all the fun my friends and I had in the studio piecing it together, shouting about getting high on molly and being clowns. It was a very social piece to do, a welcome diversion amid a lot of other one-person-at-a-time recording sessions for our more traditional studio pieces. The band has since talked about reproducing this kind of big-vocal-chorus feel, but it's HAAAAAAARD, and time consuming, especially to mix and engineer well in the booth. We'll see...
#23. "Over It" - while it wasn't the most ambitious tune we've ever written, the simplicity and purity of this melancholic love song gives it endurance. Alongside Fly and maybe one or two others, it's a rare song I regularly go back to from the very first 2012 record. It's also a track I can objectively like because, I actually had very little to do with it. While I produced it, I didn't play much on it and it was written entirely by my first lead singer Summer. It was one of the first times I sat back and watched my band hit creative fruition, making things on their own without any of my guidance and control. It's a soft, delicate and carefully-crafted piece, and a secret favorite of mine.
#24. "Skip a Day" - co-authored by me and my ex-counterpart Emily, this song came the closest to the sound I've been looking for in Great Highway out of everything from those early days. I didn't have the production chops to fully realize the Hot-Chip-esque tone of it. But the weird and flirty synth layers, sound samples, and layered harmonies all contributed to an overall tone that I've since tried to adopt more successfully in the new version of the band. In some ways, I think of this song as the beginning of Great Highway's maturity. It was recorded pretty late in the Ghost of Us sessions in 2013, and it belongs alongside the more recent tracks, flaws and all.
#25. "The Current" - our guitarist Sean used to write a lot more in his former band, but took an intentional backseat in Great Highway's writing process, allowing mostly Sarah and I to write all the songs since 2014. That said, once in awhile he pens a tune just for us, and it's always a great addition to any record we're working on. The Current was his 2nd effort, an intellectual, thoughtful, measured, and carefully-crafted look at human connection. It's also a welcome diversion in the middle of our third album Industrial Love Scene, which was filled with a lot of more emotionally-driven tunes - angry bitter songs like Singe and Little Black Book, anguished sadness from Smoke and The Venom In Me. All great songs, but without The Current anchoring them I think ILS would've been too depressing of a record.
#26. "The World Opens Up" - I have always liked this two-part song for two reasons: I love the rare storytelling mode it uses. The lyrics move like a written narrative, with characters and plot points rather than simply emotions. It doesn't move people as much as other songs I've since written, but it's a refreshing change of pace. I also LOVE the way the ending came out - such a great moment in this uneven sophomore record, and we have since reused that part of the tune in remixes we've performed live.
#27. "For the Record" - this is the short opening track to Great Highway's second album. It was created to try and front-load the record with loads of energy and intensity, to grab the audience's attention. It was also an effort to utilize our unique ability to write multiple-harmony a cappella arrangements using primarily Emily's and my own voices. Sadly, at this point in my production process I hadn't really figured out how to effectively mix and produce a power block of vocals. We also picked harmonies that really pushed the upper limits of our vocal ranges, and the strain is obvious. That said, this is still a fun romp, and also fun to have a rare super-short Great Highway song. The lyrics are meant to set up the arc of the concept album - a journey through an entire romantic relationship and the powerful effect that new romance (and break up) can have on a life.
#28. "Singe" - Singe was a last-second addition to our last album Industrial Love Scene, an attempt to inject a little more aggression and angst into the record after writing more chill and laid-back tunes like Smoke and The Current. As with a few other 'rocking' tunes, I'm critical of my voice on this one, which doesn't quite effectively carry the booming angry high notes. But we also still play this one in our repertoire today because despite its flaws, it's fun as hell and makes a great stage piece.
#29. "Hands On You" - Hands On You was a love song written by our first female singer. It's one of the sweetest purest Great Highway songs ever performed, uncomplicated, but effective. I think it was performed eloquently and can take very little credit - most of the instrumental work was a combination of our singer Summer and our guitarist Earl, both of whom have since moved on to bigger and better creative endeavors. My heart is warm when I listen to this song, and I'm reminded that although Great Highway has also gotten bigger and better, there were always good times, even at the beginning.
#30. "Our Tiny Fortresses" - this was among the first Great Highway songs with a real string instrument (in this case, a cello). It's also a tribute to one of my favorite bands, Stars, and an attempt to recall their aesthetic in a tune of my own making. I don't often write sad songs myself, so looking back on this oldie, I'm struck by its uniqueness in the catalogue. Two people singing to each other about the end of their relationship - what could be more indie-melancholic-yet-heartwarming than that?
#31. "Fly (Intro)" - Fly is really the 'flagship' song of Great Highway. It was the first original we ever performed, the first song I ever wrote for the band. The final album version of it is very different, much more mature and with different lyrical content. But before that rendition, we had what is now known as the Fly Intro, a short two-verse two-chorus piece with a 3/4 time change that was actually sung a cappella before guitars and piano were added. The album version is obviously my preferred track, but there's something charming and innocent about this earlier cut.
#32. "Bended Blue" - before Great Highway I was briefly in a couple other bands, mostly playing covers. A bassist who played in one of them had written a series of instrumental jams on guitar / bass / synth, and found out I was a lyricist and songwriter on the side. She gave me Bended Blue without the lyrics and asked me to write around it. I've never taken a challenge like that before - usually other songwriters have lyrics and no music, and need my help composing catchy hooks or what have you. I had a lot of fun putting together this first of several "sex songs" I've written.
#33. "Take Me Away" - I never say this is one of my favorite Great Highway songs. But for some reason I go back to it often, and listen to it a lot - more than some songs that are in my top 10. I think it just FEELS good, in a way you can't describe sometimes. It's like that kinda shitty tune you loved in high school, that you're embarrassed about now but that you sometimes bust out in the shower and sing as loud as you can. Take Me Away was my personal attempt to write a pop synth track along the likes of early Owl City or Sailship or any of those vaguely Christian superproduced electro outfits. It's a sweet slightly achy love song written for no real reason at all, and I love it.
#34. "Switch / Flip" - another track I'd love a chance to re-produce, this is a rare solo effort on my part with no other musicians present on the track. It was used as filler to generate an EP after the release of our sophomore album, and with the exception of some background "ah"s it's entirely instrumental. It tells the story of a man, or a woman, gradually lifting herself out of her dreary desk job, and taking a nice imagined trip through childhood and sunshine and space, finding happiness in fantasy. It was full of great firsts for my production style - the introduction of 8-bit synth, use of sound effects, octaved bass lines, all stuff I've since employed to greater effect.
#35. "Sad Songs" - an even older lineup of the band from 2012 put together this understated, soft song about loss and the expression of loss in music. It's a very simple 6-track recording of guitar and vocals from Summer, a 2nd layer of expressive lead guitar from Earl, and light synth elements I added in at the end. Almost nothing since that we've produced has ever been this elegant and simple. I listen to this song to remind myself that great pop music doesn't have to have 47 layers and a brilliant set of poetic metaphors; sometimes a sad song can just be a sad song.
#36. "This Ship" - the 2013 lineup of Great Highway used to listen to a lot of Radiohead and, in fact, even covered a Radiohead song at one time. That's not our style anymore, but at the height of our melancholic indie rock phase, we wrote this strange twisting tune about a psychedelic acid experience between two lovers. It was ambitious, and overdone, and it had too many ideas in it. But it's also a tour de force of our creativity. This is one of those tracks I wish I had the time and resources to re-produce.
#37. "Solace" - another early early recording from the deep vault. Recorded on three tracks in GarageBand to help launch Great Highway's early web presence. Deep submerging reverb was used to disguise the fact that we had no idea how to produce music yet. It actually ended up fairly well fitting the somberness of the songwriting.
#38. "The Way It Goes" - a desperate attempt at dance rock before the band really had any of the equipment or know-how to record synth. This track is important to me as a kind of progenitor, the beginning of a path out of acoustic rock and into electronic. My voice never lent itself well to this kind of high-energy pop, so it's far from my best performance, but it's fun to listen back and see how it all started.
#39. "You're Crazy" - this unusually wordy piece was one of my "story songs," detailing a specific event in my life. It describes my only encounter with my ex-girlfriend's mother at her remote cabin on Maui, and how things quickly went hilariously yet darkly wrong. It was re-recorded later to be about a fictional romantic relationship, but I think it lost some of its quirky sinisterness. Not a well-polished track, and a bit too long (and WAY too hard to play live), but I still like it.
#40. "Off of the Plan" - my ex-girlfriend, ex-bandmate and lead singer Emily wrote this track for our concept album "Ghost of Us" in 2013. The idea of the album was to tell the entire story of a romantic relationship from start to finish. Off of the Plan was the big breakup song, and she wrote it with an unexpected edge and grit that, frankly, should've been a wake-up call in our real relationship. It's a hard track for me to listen to, given how poorly things went shortly after recording this song, and the temporary end of Great Highway that followed. But it's important to remember the bad times as well as the good, and to recall how far the band has come since those days.
#41. "Where You Are" - recorded with a friend of mine who I was singing with in an a cappella group, I used this track to start my first web presence as a band. This track was actually done before the Great Highway moniker even existed - I think we were just calling ourselves by our first names at the time. This low-budget recording is special for one primary reason: it was the first time I ever recorded anything with instruments. Prior to that, I had only recorded vocals; this scrappy GarageBand track started my transition from a cappella to band.
#42. "Summer" - this song was recorded at the very very beginning of Great Highway after a vacation to Maui. I was still in a weird pop rock phase listening to Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson and trying to emulate that folksy surfer sound. I never really had the voice for that stuff, and the lines I came up with are even cheesier than theirs. But I still have a fondness for this cute silly tune.