Solstice is the oldest song on this album, both in spirit and time of completion. This song started to take shape in my mind the first time I heard Ben Howard’s song Old Pine back in 2011. To this day it is still one of my favourite songs ever. It encapsulates a grand sense of harmony and adventure; the zen you get from being around friends in nature.
In the late winter of 2017 I had just returned from a New Zealand summer and felt so invigorated and inspired. I had recently gone through big fallings out with once dear friends, and had departed my university atmosphere after finishing my undergraduate degree. It was a big time of opportunity and change. Life felt like it could go in any direction. The sense of possibility was so exciting. I think it is reflected well in my writing about the song from its demo release:
“The pinnacle of summer; a culminating or turning point. A metaphor for boundless opportunity. The reminder of good things to come and acknowledgement of things gone amiss. A time to start unnerving and exciting steps toward the newest version of yourself.
Solstice epitomizes my impressions of summer: adventure, exploration, liberation, reinvention, rediscovery, reconnection, and revitalization. I hope you enjoy in listening as much as I have in creating.”
I had been playing around with open guitar tunings, inspired by Ben Howard but also a more recently discovered John Butler song, Ocean. Find it here. I think that open guitar tuning sound that both these songs have really evokes a freeness you can’t achieve with standard tuning on a guitar. It also immediately sounds folky on an acoustic guitar. For anyone who doesn’t know, open tuning your guitar means that you change the tunings of the strings from their standard tuning so that they ring in open intervals (fifths, fourths, and octaves) with the rest of the strings on the guitar. This creates a consonant, harmonious ringing, more akin to the harmonic series in my opinion, and also a shimmery chorus effect due to the slightly out-of-phase ringing between strings. Changing the tuning of a guitar also changes the finger positions for chords, which has the added advantage of removing a player from the theory of the fretboard to which they can become accustomed, and potentially uninspired by. The rules change and you can invent something fresh.
After playing around with chording and riffs in a new tuning, I came up with the skeleton of Solstice in a week or so. One evening after work I decided that I was really feeling it and needed some lyrics for the song. I scribbled down some ideas that felt inspired and, within the matter of about an hour, arranged most of them into a full song.
I recorded, mixed, and released a version of it by myself a few weeks later. It didn’t sound very good. I ended up taking it down from my bandcamp page later, but still felt I wasn’t finished with it. That summer I did a little tour and when we played it, it felt like it wasn’t very exciting for the rest of the band. Maybe it was just a song that could only fully exist in my head.
It wasn’t until 2020, when we were rehearsing the record’s rhythm tracks, that Max and the Minimums actually played it as a group. I finally had confidence in the track again. Chris immediately knew what to play on drums to get the energy I so badly wanted. Richard heard those hollow chords and beefed them up with a juicy bass tone. Joel worked his usual magic, imbuing the track with ambience, a beautiful rock-like force, and soaring slide guitar lines. Solstice finally felt complete. I am so happy to finally share the finished product with you.
Listen to the track here.