Interview with Hite’s Crossing

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Episode Summary

In this episode of Rollz Radio, I speak with Ryan, the musician behind Hites Crossing – a long‑running guitar‑driven ambient project shaped by nature, hiking, and the emotional landscapes of the outdoors. I love the way he channels environment, memory, and movement into layered soundscapes.

We talk about how Hites Crossing began nearly 20 years ago, how early influences like post‑rock, drone, and minimalist composers shaped his approach, and how a recent move from California to Colorado sparked two companion albums: Lifeboat Songs and Shore Songs. We also listen to his track “California Towhee” and break down the field recordings, baritone guitar textures, and emotional story behind it.

This conversation is part nostalgia, part creative process, and part reflection on how place shapes art.

Key Topics

  • The origins of the Hites Crossing project
  • Early influences: post‑rock, drone, Steve Reich, and experimental recording
  • How moving from California to Colorado inspired two companion albums
  • Using field recordings and outdoor soundscapes in songwriting
  • The story behind the track “California Towhee”
  • Baritone guitar textures and acoustic recording techniques
  • Processing life transitions through music
  • What’s next for Hites Crossing

Featured Track

This episode features “California Towhee,” a reflective acoustic‑driven piece built around field recordings of birds from Ryan’s former home in California. The track blends:

  • A Taylor 8‑string baritone acoustic
  • Layered mic + DI signals
  • Outdoor ambience captured on a phone recorder
  • A melodic theme written while sitting outside listening to birds

The song serves as a personal farewell to a place he lived for 15 years and a musical way of processing the move to Colorado.

Gear Mentioned

  • Taylor 8‑string baritone acoustic (acoustic‑electric)
  • Blended mic + DI recording setup
  • Field recordings captured on mobile recorder
  • Layered acoustic textures and ambient processing

Chapter Markers

  • 00:00 — Intro & Rollz McGuyver
  • 00:40 — Introducing Hites Crossing
  • 02:00 — How the project began 20 years ago
  • 04:00 — Early influences: post‑rock, drone, Steve Reich
  • 06:00 — Playing the featured track
  • 07:30 — The story behind “California Towhee”
  • 12:00 — Field recordings & baritone guitar
  • 15:00 — Processing the move from CA to CO
  • 18:00 — Lifeboat Songs & Shore Songs
  • 20:00 — Where to find Hites Crossing

Links & References

Other Episodes of Rollz Radio

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker 1
Rollz Radio
00:00:07 Speaker 1
All right, welcome to Rolls Radio.
00:00:10 Speaker 1
Today’s episode features a guest who writes with his guitar and he does soundscapes and very influenced by his outdoor surroundings and writes his music based on that.
00:00:27 Speaker 1
So today’s interview is with
00:00:29 Speaker 1
Ryan from Pights Crossing.
00:00:31 Speaker 1
So let’s get started.
00:00:33 Speaker 1
Ryan, you and I are friends.
00:00:34 Speaker 1
We’ve been friends for a little while.
00:00:36 Speaker 1
And we worked together in different places before.
00:00:43 Speaker 1
But I think you and I made a connection when, first of all, I saw you wearing a do make say thing skirt.
00:00:51 Speaker 1
And you listened to explosions in the sky.
00:00:54 Speaker 1
And
00:00:55 Speaker 1
We just had a kind of a connection.
00:00:57 Speaker 1
Then we ended up being on the same team together.
00:00:59 Speaker 1
But the reason I ask you here to be a part of this podcast is because I know that you’re someone who’s passionate about music.
00:01:07 Speaker 1
I know that you play guitar, that you’re a person who likes to create.
00:01:13 Speaker 1
So I wanted to talk to you a little bit, first of all, about your project, Heights Crossing, and then play a song, one of your songs,
00:01:22 Speaker 1
And then talk a little bit about the instrumentation you use and some of the other things that you’ve done to do that.
00:01:28 Speaker 1
So how long have you been doing the Heights Crossing project and what other information about that could you share?
00:01:35 Speaker 2
Yeah, so I think I started the Heights Crossing project, wow, probably about 20 years ago, if I had to think about it.
00:01:45 Speaker 2
And I remember a really good friend of mine was going to CalArts on a music scholarship.
00:01:50 Speaker 2
And so he was handing me down all his old recording equipment, this is like the dawn of recording, and just passing me all this like avant-garde post-rock and drone music and like Steve Reich and just getting me into all the right music.
00:02:03 Speaker 2
And, you know, we were making music together, just hanging out, and I thought, yeah, I want to start recording my own thing.
00:02:09 Speaker 2
And it kind of took off from there, just as me kind of throwing my ideas down and layering different instruments on top of them.
00:02:18 Speaker 1
Now you had been playing, you’d been playing guitar for that prior.
00:02:23 Speaker 2
Yeah, my uncle had given me my first guitar when I was about 12.
00:02:27 Speaker 2
And I kind of like grew up like everybody playing like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
00:02:32 Speaker 2
And then I got into Radiohead, like everybody does in college.
00:02:35 Speaker 2
So yeah, I’ve been playing guitar for a little bit, but never really formally.
00:02:40 Speaker 2
Like I took an intro to guitar class and learned the basic chords and how to read tabs.
00:02:45 Speaker 2
And that was it.
00:02:45 Speaker 2
And after that, I just kind of stumbled my way through the rest.
00:02:49 Speaker 1
Now, have you been in any bands before?
00:02:52 Speaker 2
A couple high school bands.
00:02:54 Speaker 2
And then I think when we were working together, I know our work did like a jam night every now and then where the work would get together and do bands.
00:03:01 Speaker 2
And I did, I think, two of those too.
00:03:03 Speaker 1
Yeah, okay.
00:03:05 Speaker 1
All right, so I want to do this thing where we kind of listen to one of your songs together and then just talk a little bit about what you were thinking and when that’ll happen.
00:03:17 Speaker 1
So I’m going to I’m going to share some audio here.
00:03:20 Speaker 1
Give me a, you can hear it.
00:03:26 Speaker 2
Yep.
00:04:24 Speaker 1
Track goes on.
00:04:25 Speaker 1
So that one is from the California Towhee Towhee.
00:04:31 Speaker 1
What is that?
00:04:33 Speaker 1
Tohee.
00:04:33 Speaker 1
Okay, so tell me a little bit about that track is where’s the inspiration from what like, because I’m kind of already transported to some outdoor, something outdoor.
00:04:42 Speaker 1
I know you’re an avid hiker.
00:04:44 Speaker 1
So I don’t know, just give me the background.
00:04:47 Speaker 2
Yeah, actually, that’s I’m really glad you picked that one because that one’s got a good background as opposed to me just going, I don’t know, I figured it out.
00:04:53 Speaker 2
So about a year ago, I moved from California to Colorado, and I had lived in the same place in California for 15 years, and I’d lived in California itself my entire life.
00:05:05 Speaker 2
And I kind of was finding a way to process that move through music.
00:05:08 Speaker 2
And so I have probably 15 songs together in this little collection I’m calling Lifeboat Songs that I need to kind of complete.
00:05:16 Speaker 2
But the idea was I was really viewing my place in California as a lifeboat and putting together some songs about what I was leaving and giving up.
00:05:24 Speaker 2
And then I have kind of a companion set of songs, a companion album of my adventures in Colorado and my arrival here that I’m calling the shore songs, kind of the, you know, leaving the lifeboat and coming to the shore.
00:05:37 Speaker 2
So the California Towhee, one of the things that was really special about where I lived was the birds.
00:05:43 Speaker 2
I really loved putting out feeders.
00:05:46 Speaker 2
And for some reason, that became a really important part of my life in that house.
00:05:50 Speaker 2
And that was one of the birds that does not exist in Colorado.
00:05:53 Speaker 2
And so I kind of made a song for that bird as my own little way of processing, leaving it.
00:05:59 Speaker 1
So did you go out and record that bird?
00:06:04 Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:06:04 Speaker 2
So what I had done, I’m trying to think of the order of things.
00:06:09 Speaker 2
I like sampling a lot of kind of outdoor sounds.
00:06:11 Speaker 2
So if I’m out hiking or if I’m in the backyard and there’s a lot of birds going on, I’ll just, use the sound recorder on my phone and name it something.
00:06:19 Speaker 2
So I had that sample and then I had gotten this really, really fun Taylor 8 string baritone.
00:06:26 Speaker 2
And I was just screwing around with the baritone outside, listening to the birds.
00:06:30 Speaker 2
And it was just, I just kind of came on that little theme, went inside, recorded it right away and just kind of built it out from there.
00:06:39 Speaker 1
So okay, so I was going to ask you what you used on it.
00:06:41 Speaker 1
Now, what did you use to record?
00:06:43 Speaker 1
Is that guitar, is that a dreadnought?
00:06:46 Speaker 1
Do you plug in or did you mic up?
00:06:49 Speaker 2
I think for that one, I, what did I do for that one?
00:06:52 Speaker 2
I think I probably did it both plugged and mic’d and probably kind of blended the two signals.
00:06:58 Speaker 2
Yeah, it is an acoustic electric dreadnought.
00:07:01 Speaker 1
And then you probably just sat there and listened to the birds and kind of just came up with the riff.
00:07:05 Speaker 1
Or was it a riff that you would have been working on for a while?
00:07:08 Speaker 1
Or did you let the birds inspire you?
00:07:11 Speaker 2
Yeah, the riff I kind of came up with sitting outside listening to the birds.
00:07:14 Speaker 2
I was just sitting out with the guitar in my little comfy chair and that came up and just felt like the right song.
00:07:21 Speaker 2
And yeah, it just it just fit.
00:07:24 Speaker 2
It’s kind of funny when things click that way.
00:07:27 Speaker 1
Yeah, very nice.
00:07:29 Speaker 1
All right, well, Ryan, that’s kind of just what I wanted to go through.
00:07:34 Speaker 1
Where can people find Heights Crossing and what are we to expect next from you?
00:07:40 Speaker 2
Oh, well, I’m on SoundCloud and Instagram is Heights Crossing.
00:07:44 Speaker 2
So Instagram, it’s at Heights Crossing.
00:07:46 Speaker 2
SoundCloud, I’m not sure how the tag works there, but just Heights Crossing.
00:07:51 Speaker 2
What’s coming up next?
00:07:53 Speaker 2
I need to get my **** in gear and get these two albums that I say I’m working on finished.
00:07:58 Speaker 2
I have, I mean, we’re talking, it’s so close to done.
00:08:01 Speaker 2
So hopefully we’ll start seeing some pieces from the Lifeboat and Shore set and maybe at some point actually an album.
00:08:09 Speaker 1
Right, my man.
00:08:10 Speaker 1
Well, thank you very much and we’ll talk again, talk again soon.
00:08:14 Speaker 2
Absolutely.
00:08:15 Speaker 2
Thanks so much for having me.
00:08:16 Speaker 2
The rhythm, the rhythm.

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