Singled Out: The High Divers “Ride With You”

Photo by Joelle Rosen

Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahk. Scratch my nostalgia itch please? Yup, The High Divers are doing that and doing it in an incredibly fantastic way. The moment that the guitar starts in on their new track “Ride With You” visions of Petty dance in my head like sugarplums…or something like that. It just cuts right to the heart and injects you full of that warm, tingly feeling that you get when you hear your favorite song after not listening to it for a while. Its that “faded LP jacket, fringe leather jacket, sepia tinged” goodness that makes you pull the needle up and listen to the track again. There is a smooth nature to the harmonies, natural and seeping out almost effortlessly. The kind of song you start singing along to after only hearing the chorus once.

Who: The High Divers

From: Charleston, SC

Song: “Ride With You”

Latest Record: EP Ride With You (out June 7)

What About It: “Ride With You” is about liberating yourself from your sleepy hometown, and knowing you need to leave to become a better person. It’s about realizing you’re falling into working a dead end job, and slowly turning into the people around you that you didn’t want to end up like.

The whole band grew up on a small Island off the coast of South Carolina called Hilton Head, and it’s now widely known that drug traffickers used the Island as a port for pot in the 70s, then cocaine in the 80s.

I grew up in a house on a creek that was actually used quite often for unloading drugs (before my Dad bought it). I would hear all these stories from my parents about people in the community who would literally just stumble on a large brick of pot, and it would change their lives. For a long time, Hilton Head only had one cop, so I like to picture everyone naked on the beach partying their ass off all night, and from what I hear, that’s not far off.

Sadler Vaden, our producer and Guitarist for Jason Isbell’s band, The 400 Unit, plays the guitar solo on this song and really just tears it up. Now, I’m driving myself crazy trying to learn his parts to play live. You see very quickly why he is one of THE Nashville guitar players…“