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On their October record Pretty Colors For Your Actions, Tall Heights wrote a spiraling little song called “Fire Escape” about hanging with Gregory Alan Isakov a few years ago at his Royale gig. This Saturday (December 1), the Massachusetts duo get upgraded from the balcony to center stage as they return home to perform their biggest headlining show ever.
“I saw our friend Gregory Alan Isakov put on a beautiful show there a year or two ago,” singer and cellist Paul Wright tells Vanyaland. “Our song ‘Fire Escape’ is in part about hanging with him on that little balcony in the back of Royale after the show. To be clear, he’s not the love interest in the song, haha, but he is my hero.”
After jumping on various opening gigs around town at venues like The House of Blues and Blue Hills Bank Pavilion (the latter of which they shared a stage with Ben Folds and Cake), Tall Heights’ show at Royale with Frances Cone and Old Sea Brigade marks a new milestone for the “electrofolk” group — specifically, an enormous leap in recognition since their formative years in Sturbridge circa 2010.
Their new record Pretty Colors For Your Actions, however, offers an initiative that extends far beyond Massachusetts. Elaborating on their thought of Pretty Colors For Your Actions as “an accord, an exchange, a quid pro quo,” Wright says that all the electronic brushstrokes of the album are meant to leak off their canvas and into reality through the responses that fans have to the chaos of 2018 (and beyond).
“We intended Pretty Colors For Your Actions to suggest the idea of ‘art to inspire good deed,’” he explains. “On the one hand, our songs are a small offering — just emotion, just paint on canvas, and they can accompany small actions, played through an iPhone speaker as you pay your bills. But ‘actions’ is no small word, and neither are colors, you know? If you think about actions on a larger scale — protests, political rallies, working against climate change, fighting a war, not fighting a war — the emotions and colors that inspire those actions start to seem a lot more important. We hope these pretty colors inspire the actions, small and large, that the world needs right now.”
TALL HEIGHTS + FRANCES CONE + OLD SEA BRIGADE :: Saturday, December 1 at Royale, 279 Tremont St. in Boston :: 6 p.m., 18-plus, $20 to 22 :: Advance tickets:: Facebook event page:: Featured photo by Jimmy Fontaine