Tall Heights
Boston, MA | Established. Jan 01, 2010 | MAJOR
Music
Press
"Fantastic" - Conan O'Brien - Team Coco
Tall Heights have come a long way since funding their first album by busking on the street for 100 days. This August, the Boston duo are set to release Neptune, their major label debut, on Sony Music Masterworks, and today, we are premiering “River Wider,” the record’s first single. It’s a pretty track with a nice cello line complementing a very catchy vocal melody, completing a folk-pop sound comparable to Sufjan Stevens or Fleet Foxes. - Stereogum
The Music: Boston duo Tim Harrington and Paul Wright couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an indie folk band, but they’re also bringing the wide open sounds of electropop to a genre known for twangs and stomps. They carry some of the cavernous thump of Little Dragon, but never venture far from their earthy influences like Fleet Foxes and, at their most ethereal, the War on Drugs.
Why You Should Listen: Harrington and Wright are filling a niche between uptempo electropop and swooning guitar rock. It’s a space that’ll yield a lot of success for the duo, so go check them out before they start selling out venues all over the country.
What’s Next: The duo head out on a North American tour this September with dates in Seattle, Los Angeles, DC, and South Burlington, Vermont.
Listen to This: “Iron in the Fire” - SPIN
The journey behind Boston folk-pop band Tall Heights in itself is an emblem of change and growth. When lifelong friends Tim Harrington and Paul Wright first moved to Boston from their sleepy hometown in suburban Massachusetts, the duo wanted to keep things simple. Humble beginnings by busking led to their first taste of genuine growth when, after 100 days of performing, the band’s immediate popularity raised enough money to fund their first album plus their entire living costs. A similar growth is portrayed on Neptune, where two individual voices are able to collaborate in order to bolster one another. After keeping things simple and sticking to what’s essential from their busking days, Tall Heights got to know their strengths intimately and with great precision, which is why they are able to use their strengths so cleverly.
While the band’s sound has grown into something seemingly much larger than the band’s two core members, the albums unwavering intimacy assures listeners that the band has stayed true to their roots. With the original band intact, the emotive harmonies and breezy folksiness only grows larger, lusher, and all the more strong. Midway through the album, “Horse to Water” cuts sparse, hollow guitar plucks with fully-fledged harmonies and a melancholic cello, making for a song equally resilient as it is depressed. Tall Heights plays with emotions and feelings well with this same practice, introducing cutting guitars and spacious synths on tracks such as “Infrared” and “Backwards and Forwards.” The band is able to trek into foreign lands with their newfound growth and sense of adventure, employing an almost electronic R&B feel to songs like “Infrared.”
While an indie folk band through and through, there is an expanse of different influences that inspired Neptune, which the band can now experiment with after learning their core skills so finely. Without their modest beginnings, Tall Heights would not have been able to push the personal boundaries they manage to easily surpass on Neptune. Learning to make the most of their minimalist approach early on, Tall Heights does not need to rely on anything flashy to garner attention. Even at their most mature, Tall Heights fully retains all that shaped them early in their career, retaining a true sense of self even during a period of such exponential growth. - Paste
Folk duo Tall Heights has quietly been putting out breathtaking track after breathtaking track leading up to the release of its major label debut, Neptune. - FUSE
Progressive indie folk duo Tall Heights started with a guitar, a cello, and two voices, busking in the streets of Boston. Six years later, singer/guitarist Tim Harrington and singer/cellist Paul Wright have explored and stretched the confines of their minimalist set-up into a full-length album titled Neptune (out August 19 via Sony Music Masterworks). Here, we are pleased to premiere the forthcoming LP's sixth track, "Infrared." It opens gently with a serene scene ("I came along an empty planet / I was born beside a lake") and steadily builds into a captivating, raw yet refined number.
"Infrared" came together in two parts. "It started when Paul wrote an 8-bar, fucked up cello line on his pedalboard and looped it for a while," recalls Harrington. The sound immediately spurred Harrington to write lyrics, and only 20 minutes after Wright emailed it to him, he replied with a nearly finished track. The speed of the process can be attributed to the chord Wright struck in his bandmate; the cello line reminded Harrington, a Massachusetts native, of a lake he grew up nearby, but when its image came to him it was of a different era—one long before Harrington's own existence. - Interview Magazine
In addition to finger-picked guitar, swelling cello and tight, prismatic vocal harmonies, “Spirit Cold” boasts a bold, airy drum part that propels the song through the peaks and troughs of the arrangement. Other tunes on the EP feature drums, electric guitar and keyboards. - Wall Street Journal
Discography
Neptune (Aug 2016)
Holding On, Holding Out EP (Oct 2015)
Man of Stone (May 2013)
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
Getting there is half the fun, as the old saying goes, but the journey is really the whole point for Boston progressive-folk duo Tall Heights. Singer/guitarist Tim Harrington and singer/cellist Paul Wright know where they’ve been, and where they want to go. As for the route, well, “we’re just mapping it out as we take it, day by day,” says Harrington.
They’ve reached their biggest junction so far — Neptune, due August 19, is Tall Heights’ first album for Sony Music Masterworks, and the latest step in the ongoing evolution of their sound and style.
Harrington and Wright formed Tall Heights in 2010, keeping their songs stripped down to their essential elements, in part, to make it simpler to perform on the streets of Boston.
Neptune is a far lusher construct: along with pristine and emotive vocal harmonies, there’s subtly chugging electric guitar and a spare descending bassline on “Iron in the Fire,” ethereal synthesizers and a spacious drum part on “Spirit Cold,” a brittle splash of percussion to open “Backwards and Forwards” and feedback created by two cellphones on “Cross My Mind.”
“It was helpful and I think comforting to define ourselves as two vocalists, guitar and cello,” Wright says. “There was a beauty and a simplicity, and stepping outside of that box is pretty scary, because you’re forced to redefine yourself and do some sonic soul-searching. I think this record reflects the results of that scary step.”
The band’s broadening sound came from the musicians’ conscious effort to push themselves, and each other, to create in new ways. By relying on a few core elements at the start, the duo learned to make the most of their minimalist set-up. “It taught us to be lean and mean and effective with just two voices and two instruments,” Harrington says. “It made us consider vocal tone and the way voices can mesh and interact.”
As those lessons took root, the pair essentially gave themselves permission to push their musical boundaries outward over three separate recording sessions at Color Study studio in tiny Goshen, Vermont, that yielded songs for their 2015 EP Holding On, Holding Out, and for Neptune. Not only did Harrington and Wright expand their sonic palette throughout the process, they also altered their approach to writing. The musicians tend to develop ideas separately, before one brings a new song to the other for further development. It’s a reflection of their early days sharing musical ideas, when Wright was living overseas and Harrington was finishing up college.
“We would send each other terrible sound-recorder voice memo files and we’d write these nice emails to each other about each other’s songs, so creating concepts independently is something we’ve always done,” says Wright, who has been friends with Harrington since they were kids growing up in the central Massachusetts town of Sturbridge.
They changed the formula on Neptune. Four songs on the album — “River Wider,” “Infrared,” “Cross My Mind” and “Growing” — are the result of one musician looping a simple instrumental part and letting the other write lyrics for it. With the last recording session looming, the duo worked faster than usual on those songs, particularly the somber, atmospheric “Cross My Mind.” “We were under the gun, he was downstairs making one thing, I was upstairs making another thing, we put them together and then we workshopped it in the car on the drive up to the studio,” says Harrington, whose Boston apartment is literally upstairs from Wright’s.
Their ever-closer collaboration, and the time they gave themselves in the studio to develop it, is indicative of the band’s developing approach to making music. “I can hear the evolution happening,” Harrington says. “I feel like we’re walking across a bridge from one place to another, and maybe I’ll always feel that way, but I’m really happy with how we’re moving.”
Band Members
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