Americana heartland-rocker John Calvin has a new LP ‘Greener Fields & Fairer Seas’ (out Jan. 24) from which ‘High Is My Favorite Height‘ is taken. In part it’s a COVID album…naturally, that’s the recording cycle we’re still in, and is the follow up to Calvin’s debut release of 2018 ‘Masquerade Monday.‘ Not only years but locations separate the two albums – a major theme of the debut was loss, but the new album looks more hopefully to the future.
John Calvin told Americana UK all about the song and its inspiration: “For the producer (Nate Campisi) and me, blending genres tends to happen organically and there’s always gear around that helps along the way. Nate has this old space echo analog delay that creates these fun, washed out loops that steadily disintegrate as the delay runs. It creates what sounds a bit like deep reverb and the overall effect is to create a languid, trippy landscape for the listener to rest in. Most of the instrumentation and production reflects that feeling. Greg DeCarolis is playing a wonky baritone guitar that clangs slightly out of tune and adds to the odd vibrations of the song. That’s the overall feel of the song, languidly odd vibrations.
Some of my favorite lyrics are, “It took the purple one to rein me in / And the green to settle down again / Now…high is my favorite height.” I wrote the song so that it could be interpreted in multiple ways. Lyrically, my aim is to always leave room for the listener and my favorite moment is when someone says “oh, that’s what that means?!?!?” or “oh, that’s what you said?!?!?” So there’s clearly room to interpret the song as trippy with trippy lyrics and themes. But the reference to purple is a reference to my daughter, whose favorite color was purple at the time. Green was my son’s favorite color at the time. Sadly, this changes regularly and they’ve been through a handful more colors since then, ha.
One of my favorite things about having kids is that everything is new to them. My son said, “daddy, high is my favorite height” because he hadn’t seen a million overpasses like the rest of us. He was rightly awestruck by the scale of something that we don’t think twice about. That’s inspiring to me. What would happen if I tried to see the world that way? And how great is it that I get to be the first one to say “try this!” to an eager kid? I can remember the first time they saw fireworks and the first time they tried my steak. And that doesn’t end. Now that they’re older, we’re starting to branch out and see more of the world. It builds a sense of wonder and hopefully a commitment to protect the things we share.”
