Tall Heights foster hope with beautiful 'Raindrop'
Review by Conner Tighe
Indie-folk band Tall Heights recently dropped their latest single, “Raindrop,” a preview to the band’s upcoming album, Juniors. The single is a soft melody of positivity and a beacon of light, extinguishing pain and darkness.
Tall Heights carefully parallels other indie-folk bands like Darlingside, Judah & the Lion, and Vance Joy. The band reaches over 900,000 monthly Spotify listeners and has been playing for 12 years. Although “Raindrop” will surely set its own records, it’s not entirely groundbreaking. Tall Heights know what fans need to hear in an uncertain time, which is where the song comes in.
“Raindrop” starts low, slow, and mellow. Careful guitar and harmonized lyrics drive ⅔ of the song until it builds to a reasonable finish. The song lays the foundation with metaphor, the raindrop signifying light, hope, or a loved one, watching someone struggle through life’s troubles. In that sense, the song is beautiful and displays a universal message many will enjoy witnessing.
Massachusetts duo Paul Wright and Tim Harrington wrote their third upcoming album, Juniors, during isolation of 2020. The two lived in “The Tall House,” located in Northeastern Massachusetts, with their wives and pets for six years. The house consisted of three floors where at the top, the two came up with their next album.
“It all happened in this tiny, hectic, beautiful space where our wives were also working from home, both pregnant, and there’s a dog and a cat that hated each other,” said Wright in a formal statement. “Tim’s toddler, who’d just started walking, would come barging in and start dancing mid-take, joining in a song with us.”
The writing process for Juniors was written over a 5-month period where much turmoil occurred. Harrington said his goodbyes to his grandfather while Wright lost a grandmother figure. The two also witnessed the destruction of substance abuse of close friends. Wright and Harrington have expressed publicly that their third album represents a spiritual experience because Juniors created a new thought process for the two. Experiencing pain, loss, and joy during the pandemic brought a sense of enlightenment the two hope to express in Juniors.
“Because we were cut loose and isolated within this space and time, we ended up capturing something incredibly and uniquely us in the new sound we created,” Harrington said in a formal statement.
Juniors is set to drop on Jan. 14.