Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Native-led rock band First Floor Highway, fronted by founder Jordan James, has released its first full-length album featuring a collection of songs that James describes as “a blend of sun-soaked rock ‘n’ roll with Indigenous influence.”
The album, “Under the Sun,” also offers cultural perspective, some NDN slang and a rock-and-roll spirit.
“This album is about where we come from, and what we carry with us,” James said in a statement. “We wanted to make something that feels honest to us, and to the people who might hear themselves in it.”
James, from the Grand Portage Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is the founder and lead singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Albuquerque-based band. Members also include Joey Monaco, Dan Sandweiss and Daniel Coburn.
The lead single, “Grand Entry,” inspired by the beginning of the modern powwow, offers a narrative that nods to artists such as Keith Secola while dancing to its own beat.
First Floor Highway performs at events, including the informal, late-night gatherings known as 49s held after a powwow. The band recently performed at the last Gathering of Nations Pow Wow, the New Mexico State Fair, and at a range of New Mexico festivals and venues.
“The genesis of the band is that we wanted to do something unique,” James told ICT. “Me and the other guys in the band. So something that I brought to the table was slipping in a lot of Indigenous characters into lyrics and into the expressions of the songs themselves. My bandmates, all being from the Southwest, were raised around this kind of stuff, so they were all for it.”
He continued, “Songs in the album are straight down the road as far as saying this is an Indigenous tune. Some of the songs just have some slang thrown in every now and then to make up for some expressions, and then some of them are straight ahead rock-and-roll tunes. We created a certain character around what we were going for and put it together.”
James says the storytelling in the “Grand Entry” song is a modern-day take on what it is like to be on the contemporary powwow circuit. The song has a lot of chiming guitar, a sound he describes as a Tom Petty traditional sound.
“Growing up we played in all kinds of different bands, punk bands, metal bands, all kinds of music,” James said. “For this album, we specifically wanted to just tread in the territory of traditional rock and roll.”
‘Hodgepodge of influence’
James was raised in the Grand Portage Reservation bordering Canada. As he was growing, he and his dad would play guitar on cold winter nights. He said he was shipped off to Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington, New Mexico, at a point where the school was moving from a traditional boarding school to a tribally-run college prep school.
“When I got there, there were still nuns living in their dormitory situations, but it wasn’t any kind of abusive boarding school situation in the ‘90s,” James said. “But it was definitely pretty rough being a 6-foot-4 Indian from Minnesota down here in the Southwest, lots of teasing and hazing going on.”
From there, James went to the University of New Mexico, where he played drums.
“Basically the pandemic is what forced me to become a songwriter/singer/guitar player,” he said. “During the pandemic during lockdown, we would do a driveway jam, where we invited a bunch of buddies over and everyone would jam in the driveway and hang out outside and socially distance. There was already a drummer, so I built that need based off of who was coming by and over time that all fell into the First Floor Highway.”
The name of the band came from what James describes as “a hodgepodge of an influence of modern urban living.”
James said the “first floor” reference is a take on creation stories that most tribes have. The Navajos, for example, have a creation story where they came up through the different worlds into today’s world, he said.
“First floor is a play on saying we’re on the first floor of Earth,” he said. “The highway is everything that connects us as part of modern urban living. Put those three things together and you get a very unique name.”
Looking ahead
The band is planning to promote the new record by playing some regional shows and local festivals in New Mexico. At the final Gathering of Nations, they played with other Native rock and blues bands at one of the local breweries on Saturday, April 25.
“We tried really hard to try to take this path because a lot of other Indigenous bands are either blues, metal or reggae,” James said. “Heavy metal rock is huge here in the Southwest and on the Navajo reservation. We tried to very specifically carve out something that not everyone else is doing.”
More info
For more information, visit the First Floor Highway website or view them on Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube Music or Apple Music.