At his home in southeast Wichita, Skinny Hightower greets me at the door, ready to get started. I follow him down the basement steps into his music sanctuary, filled with instruments.
“I call it my tiny studio. It has basically everything I need. It’s got my drums, multiple basses, my keyboards, it’s just a space where I can really create without distraction. I love it, and I’m thankful to God that I can be in here full-time and do what I love to do.
“And you play all these instruments?” I asked.
“Yes”, Hightower said, “Thanks to my family who reared me up with music.”
Both of his parents played instruments. Hightower can remember sitting on his father’s knee at 2, learning to play the drums. His mother taught him piano when he was about 8.
Named Jason Carroll at birth, he affectionately received the name Skinny Hightower from a Chief Warrant Officer in the Army, who said he reminded him of the character in the sitcom, The Steve Harvey Show, and it stuck.
Standing in his basement, I asked him, “What are we doing here today?”
“I want to create a song,” he said, “and I try not to do narratives too much, but I really want this to be a summertime-feel good-roller skating-dancing -kind of old school-funky song. So, I want to try something that will get people moving and see what happens.”
“So, what happens first?” I asked.
“It’s the logistics making sure I get the tempo right,” Hightower said. “It’s got to fit; the pulse is everything. When you think about us, as people, the heartbeat is the thing that drives us. Music has to have that, so I set the heartbeat first and I just build on top of that, and I listen to the music, and it tells me what I need to do.”
Hightower begins to play a few bars of a chord progression on the keyboard.
“Skinny, I have to tell you, I’m in heaven right now,” I said. “I mean, I absolutely love it! How did you come up with what you just did? The chords there?”
“I can hear it in my head”, he said. “There’s a baseline that comes with it. It will all glue together once I play that baseline, but I heard that chord structure in my head, and it’s just a matter of putting it down. I’m going to keep as much of that as possible,” he said, as he kept on playing.”
“What do you mean by keep as much as possible?” I asked.
“We as humans, we make mistakes,” he said. “I’m going off of the top of my head, really, I’m not going to be doing a whole bunch of takes because if you do that, you lose the authenticity. I will do takes if I need to, but I want to keep this rollin’ as much as possible because it adds a, I call it, ‘feel.’ It’s the groove plus time, plus the human element, equals ‘feel’ and you don’t want to remove any of those elements otherwise, you lose ‘the feel.’”
“I love it. I love it,” I said.
Hightower continues to play, moving from keyboards to bass, and says, “I’m going to keep it for now. I’m not going to clean any of that up. Once the drums are added, you will have the meat and potatoes of the song. I’ve just got to add the horns.”
He continues to play the bass and stops, “I can hear stuff that needs to be added,” he said. “We’re getting somewhere. That feels good.” He starts and pauses, adding nuances along the way.
“I want to make sure the bass part follows what the keys did,” Hightower said, “but still establishes that pulse because you still want to dance, you still want to move, but you want to give a little bit of deviation just to mix things up. So, I’m going to experiment just to see what fits, what doesn’t work, and what ultimately feels the best.”
Hightower starts to really groove on the guitar and abruptly stops, “I was starting to feel it,” he said. “You don’t want to miss that. I don’t care if it’s the first take, once you know what you want to do and it feels good, if you’re not recording, stop and then record.
You’ve got to catch that feeling. Even if you mess up a little bit, you have to get that feeling, so I’m going to start recording that right now, even though I don’t have that perfectly planned out, I want to capture as much as magic in the bottle as possible.“
Hightower then begins to play another bass guitar he grabbed off the wall, then pauses, “This is going to sound crazy,” he said, “but I might go upstairs and get a coffee cup because I hear … there’s got to be a sound I can create, not like a cow bell, not like an agogo, it’s something inbetween, and a coffee cup, the handle, if you hit it the right way, with the right tool, oh man, it makes an amazing percussive instrument. So, I’m going to try it out and see how that sounds.”
“How did you discover that?” I asked.
“I was listening to ‘Don’t Stop Until You Get Enough,’” Hightower said, “and I think Michael Jackson played some of the percussion in it. There is some stuff in there that’s not normal. If you are really listening, it’s like, ‘What in the world is he playing with?’ and the closest thing I could come up with was the handle of a coffee cup. I never tried it; we’ll try it and see what it sounds like, but I’m pretty sure it will get me what I need.”
Hightower rummages through his musical toolbox for just the right instrument to tap the handle of a coffee cup he obtained from upstairs. He finds a striker that he uses on his triangle instrument.
He begins to record himself keeping the beat on the coffee cup, then mixes that with the sound of the drums he played.
“That was just the right accent, just the right enhancement,” Hightower said. “It’s different. It felt like it needed it, and I think that actually did it. Wow. Let’s see what it sounds like with everything.”
After listening back to the mix, Hightower said, “That’s different…and it works! Ok, we’re getting somewhere. I listen to whatever the song tells me needs to happen. It sounds weird but I know what needs to happen, based off what I’m hearing.”
“So that dictates how you put it all together?” I asked.
“Every time,” he said. “I had an idea in my head where we needed to start, and that’s what we’re doing. The stuff that you are hearing is everything I heard previously in my head. As I’m doing it, it’s like, ‘Ok, now I heard this in my head,’ and I have to keep doing whatever I’m doing, and the next thing will come.”
Skinny Hightower completed “Summer Anthem” organically in less than 24 hours. The single was released on June 12, 2026, on his record label, CastOver Records. All music produced by Skinny’s production house, Edify Sound Enterprises, LLC.
