Boombox Blitz: Highwind honors old friend with evocative ‘Afterlife (How’ve You Been?)’
The alt-rock musician remembers an old friend with his emotional new music video.
Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.
There are days a smell, a sound or a lingering taste can catapult you back in time to a life now forever extinguished. Memories come back in flashes of light, triggering, like a nightmare reel faded and muted from years of replay. It’s homemade movies with no off switch. And it can be terribly easy to get trapped in grief, left wandering the halls of the past and glued to would haves, could haves, should haves. While such visitations can be damaging to your very own progression in this life, it can be necessarily cathartic, an emotional journey through which you can rediscover yourself and learn to cope. New Jersey’s Christopher Russo Jr. mounts a solo alt-rock project called Highwind, offering up a sticky, half-melted taffy of punk and rock on his debut EP. But the first single is of crucial significance in his musical excavations.
“Afterlife (How’ve You Been?)” is a mid-tempo frolic written in memory of Russo’s best friend Adam Rarela, who passed away from a tragic car crash a few years ago. Russo walks the listener back through his pain, but in unearth his tears once again, a rather beautiful tribute emerges in crisp colors and patterns. “Hey, buddy, how’ve you been? / I hope the afterlife is treating you well up there / I know it’s been a little while since we last spoke,” he sings, monster guitars and percussion crashing into one another, maneuvering across his heartstrings in sweeping overtones. “But I still hear your voice as clear as the southern air / It brought a tear to my eye, like it always does / Why did this wild life have to rip you away? / Regardless when and how there’s nothing that I can change / There’s still just so much more I wish that I got to say.”
In the accompanying music video, directed by Kris Khunachak Media, Russo leans into the melancholy without apology. He makes his way underneath the vibrant fall foliage, slowly plodding along and waxing contemplative and solemn, to meet up with a couple of fellow comrades, who have certainly felt the brunt of mourning, too. The song, caving underneath the roar of traditional rock music, serves as the backbone to his new EP, engaging with universal truths no pain and heartache. “I hear you sing for me / I see your butterfly flutter and float away / The closest thing I have / To seeing you is this cardinal that’s here to stay / I’m thinking maybe you’ve made a new friend or two,” he considers of what comes next, perhaps a new lease on life both below and above the clouds. Russo’s voice, too, packs a hearty punch to the gut, and his tone is equal parts weepy, hopeful and sweet. He marches onward, “Another angel, someone as sweet as you / You’re showing signs, and giving me living proof / There was no goodbye, just, ‘See you again real soon.'”
“Afterlife (How’ve You Been?)” anchors Highwind’s debut EP, How’ve You Been?, out now.
Watch below:
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