Today we’d like to introduce you to The Solons: John & Jimmy Flynn and Harry Ostrander.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
JOHN: Well, I’ve known Jimmy since I was 18 months old, and our mom brought him home from the hospital.
JIMMY: And John and I have known Harry for almost 25 years. We grew up together on the same street in Sacramento.
HARRY: My dad coached Jimmy and I’s soccer team and we hung out pretty much every weekend. So we’ve all been friends a long time.
JOHN: But fast forward: I got COVID during the summer of 2022 and was bored stiff waiting to test negative for two weeks. I got tired of watching TV, so I decided to pick up my Dad’s guitar and play some simple songs by guys like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson for a few hours every day. It was like my fourth time trying to learn the guitar, but this time it stuck.
JIMMY: John and I work together as writers, and when we’re banging our heads against the wall trying to think of script ideas, we sometimes make up bullshit songs just to make each other laugh.
JOHN: I came up with some chords for one of our bullshit songs, returned to LA, and showed it to Jimmy. He loved it. And once we started, we just kept coming up with ideas for songs. After a couple of months, we had about 20 tracks and, somewhat in disbelief, we realized: “We’ve got an album.”
JIMMY: But we had no way to produce it. We had to call in the big guns. So I rang up our good pal, Harry.
HARRY: When Jimmy asked me to produce the album, I thought, “Well, I’m only a humble professional trumpet player who has worked with some of the biggest names in the music industry, but I’ve never produced a full album.” Then Jimmy showed me the songs he and John had been working on, and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, so I said, “Why not? Let’s do it.”
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
JIMMY: We had a lot of fun recording the album—probably the most fun I’ve ever had working on a project. But there were some struggles.
HARRY: Yeah. For one thing, John and Jim are not professional musicians. They can’t read music and can’t really sing.
JOHN: Guilty. It’s like, some notes are little circles, some of those circles have lines coming out of them and some of those lines have flags? Like, what’s up with that? It’s too confusing! Me and Jim? We just put the letters of the chords somewhere near the lyrics and figure out the rest on the fly.
JIMMY: This is a little embarrassing, but we got so thrown off playing with a metronome that Harry just let us record without it.
HARRY: It was, quite simply, the most unprofessional recording environment I’ve ever been a part of.
JIMMY: However, there’s two things we can do: write lyrics and accept constructive criticism.
HARRY: Yeah, as a result of their utter lack of formal knowledge, I had to be pretty hard on them during the recordings. If they were off-pitch, I’d just say “Nope,” and we’d do another take. If they were really struggling, I’d sing on pitch and have them match me. There was some hand-holding, but eventually, we got what we wanted.
JOHN: Since we’ve known Harry for so long, Jim and I didn’t take his feedback personally. We laughed really hard during the more egregious mistakes. We trust him completely. We may write the songs, but Harry makes them into music.
JIMMY: We also like to joke about credit in the band—who’s the star, who’s the best, who’s the frontman?
HARRY: There’s a made-up disease we came up with: “Frontman-itis.”
JIMMY: It can be incurable.
JOHN: Symptoms include spotlight seeking and delusions of grandeur.
JIMMY: I think we all have “Frontman-itis” to a certain extent.
HARRY: Yeah, but we all know who the real frontman is…
JIMMY/JOHN/HARRY: Me.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
HARRY: I would say the biggest thing we are proud of is that our first project is a full-length album. Not a single, not an EP, but a full, 11-track album.
JIMMY: That was something we were all in agreement on from the beginning. We wanted to record a full album to really make a statement and set ourselves apart. Hell, I was pushing for a double album.
HARRY: That was never going to happen.
JOHN: With the music, I think we also just don’t take ourselves too seriously. We know we’re not the best singers, but we write funny lyrics and have a lot of fun making it.
HARRY: A lot of musicians think that the music they’re making will change the world. We don’t have any of that.
JOHN: At the same time, we worked hard on this and tried to make it as good as we could. We wanted to make something that people could find funny while also tapping their toes. And that’s something that’s going to carry over as we continue to record more songs.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
HARRY: Well, I certainly took a risk producing an album from two brothers who can’t sing or read music.
JOHN: And Jimmy and I took a smaller risk working with a producer who had never produced an album before.
JIMMY: But that sense of risk is what made it all so fun. We gave ourselves the freedom to mess up, to have to re-record things, to try new instruments, to sing in unique ways. That exploration was the best part of it.
HARRY: But it definitely took a lot of time.
JOHN: A lot of damn time, but we really enjoyed having an excuse to go visit Harry for a day, work as a team on a project we all cared about, and then go to town on ungodly amounts of food afterward.
JIMMY: That’s true. When we were recording, we’d basically stay in Harry’s garage for, like, 10 hours, subsisting solely upon highly processed snacks—Ruffles, Cheez-Its, Oreo Cakesters. So in terms of proper nutrition, we were taking huge risks. But then at the end of the session, we’d treat ourselves to a nice dinner.
HARRY: I’d like to give a special thanks to the al pastor stand near the freeway in Lakewood. They revitalized us with huge burritos and mulitas, time and time again.
JOHN: It really takes a village to make an instantly classic album that not only captures the cultural zeitgeist but also pushes it forward in a bold and provocative fashion.
JIMMY: I apologize on behalf of my brother. Media attention is one of the main triggers of Frontman-itis.
Pricing:
- iTunes ($7.99) – purchase our debut album, SOME GUYS
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesolons/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesolons
- Other: Spotify Artist Link – https://open.spotify.com/artist/3NgrcKzz2wbOH5WKQdscBg?si=UqR6uS4TQeuKgXnR4Uwc6A
iTunes/Apple Music Link – https://music.apple.com/us/album/some-guys/1707644737
Image Credits
Photographer Credits: Lauren Gatto, The Solons Note: In the “Personal Photo,” The Solons are pictured: Jimmy Flynn (left), John Flynn (center) Harry Ostrander (right).
