The 2000s File Feature
Come On Get Higher
Come On Get Higher: Matt Nathanson's Breakthrough into the Billboard Mainstream Matt Nathanson had spent more than a decade as a beloved figure on the tourin…
01 The Story
Come On Get Higher: Matt Nathanson's Breakthrough into the Billboard Mainstream
Matt Nathanson had spent more than a decade as a beloved figure on the touring singer-songwriter circuit before "Come On Get Higher" finally delivered the mainstream breakthrough he had long seemed positioned for. Released in 2008 as the lead single from his major-label debut album Some Mad Hope on Vanguard Records, the song became his first significant entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and introduced his emotionally direct, guitar-driven pop-rock to a national radio audience that had not previously encountered his work in large numbers.
Some Mad Hope was released on August 19, 2008, and its commercial success was driven almost entirely by "Come On Get Higher," which proved to have unusual staying power on adult contemporary and hot adult contemporary radio formats. The song peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 chart and performed strongly on multiple radio monitoring charts through late 2008 and into 2009, demonstrating the kind of slow-build chart performance that was characteristic of radio-driven hits in the era before streaming metrics reshaped chart methodology.
The track was produced with a clean, expansive sound that balanced Nathanson's folk-influenced acoustic guitar foundation with the anthemic production values of mid-2000s pop-rock radio. The arrangement was carefully calibrated to succeed in the format environment of the time: guitars prominent enough to signal authenticity to listeners who prized organic instrumentation, but polished and dynamically shaped enough to compete on commercial radio with the more heavily produced pop of the era. The result was a song that felt both personal and immediately legible to a mass audience.
Nathanson had built his reputation through years of relentless touring and a series of independently released albums that earned devoted followings in the acoustic and coffee-house circuit. His earlier records, including Beneath These Fireworks from 2003 and At the Point from 2000, had demonstrated his songwriting gifts to dedicated fans, but the transition to a major-label deal and to the production scale of Some Mad Hope was what finally aligned his talents with commercial radio's requirements. Vanguard Records, long associated with folk and singer-songwriter traditions, provided an institutional home that understood how to market his particular blend of earnest romanticism.
The timing of the song's release was favorable for its particular style. The late 2000s saw a modest resurgence in guitar-driven pop-rock at mainstream radio, with artists like John Mayer, Lifehouse, and Matchbox Twenty having established a commercial lane for emotionally direct, adult-oriented rock music. "Come On Get Higher" fit within that lane while adding Nathanson's distinctively literary approach to romantic lyric-writing and his performance style, which carried enough raw intensity to feel genuine even within a polished production context.
Critical reception to the song was warm, with reviewers noting that Nathanson had managed to translate his live intensity into a recorded format without losing the intimacy that made his performances compelling. The album Some Mad Hope received broadly positive reviews, with many critics pointing to "Come On Get Higher" as evidence that Nathanson's songwriting could operate effectively at a scale larger than the intimate venues where he had built his name.
The song's commercial success also opened doors for Nathanson in the television licensing market, with the track appearing in several television programs and movie trailers in the years following its release. This kind of secondary market placement was increasingly important for singer-songwriters in the late 2000s, as the collapse of traditional album sales models made synchronization licensing an essential revenue stream. For Nathanson, the placements reinforced the song's reach, introducing it to new audiences who might encounter it in an emotional television moment and then seek out the original recording.
In the years after its release, "Come On Get Higher" solidified its status as Nathanson's signature song, the track that most listeners encountered first and the one that continued to anchor his live sets as a guaranteed audience moment. His subsequent albums, including Modern Love in 2013, benefited from the goodwill and name recognition that the song had established. Within the context of his career, "Come On Get Higher" represents the moment when a decade of artistic development finally aligned with commercial circumstances to produce a genuine crossover hit.
02 Song Meaning
The Ache of Wanting: What "Come On Get Higher" Really Expresses
"Come On Get Higher" is a song about longing so acute it registers as physical, a state in which the absence of someone beloved is experienced not just emotionally but in the body, as a kind of low-grade withdrawal. Matt Nathanson builds the song around the idea that romantic connection carries its own physiological weight: when it is present, it elevates; when it is absent, it leaves behind a specific kind of heaviness that ordinary life cannot fill. The track's title functions as both an appeal and a description of the sensation the speaker is pursuing, the feeling of being raised out of ordinary flatness into something larger and more vivid.
The song is addressed directly to an absent person, which gives it the emotional grammar of a letter or a confession rather than a performance. Nathanson constructs the speaker as someone fully aware of how irrational intense longing can appear from the outside, but incapable of moderating it on the basis of that awareness. This tension between self-knowledge and helplessness is one of the song's most emotionally recognizable qualities: the speaker knows what is happening to him but cannot stop wanting what he wants.
The language of elevation and height runs throughout the song as a sustained metaphor. Being in the presence of the person being addressed is associated with altitude, with a kind of expanded consciousness that ordinary experience cannot replicate. The "higher" of the title is both literal and figurative, pointing simultaneously toward the heights of emotional experience and the specific altered state that intense romantic connection can produce. This is not a song about contentment or simple happiness; it is a song about the vertigo of love, the way it recalibrates the experience of everything else by comparison.
There is also a quality of surrender in the emotional register that distinguishes the song from more assertive romantic pop of the period. The speaker is not negotiating or strategizing; he is simply and fully undone by the experience of missing someone. This quality of emotional exposure was central to Nathanson's identity as a songwriter, and it is what made "Come On Get Higher" resonate so strongly with listeners who felt that mainstream pop-rock often kept emotion at arm's length behind production gloss. The song's commitment to the experience of longing without irony or deflection was what made it feel distinctive.
The song also functions as a kind of secular spiritual, in the tradition of love songs that borrow the vocabulary of religious experience to describe romantic states. The language of transcendence, of being lifted above the ordinary, of experiencing something that feels too large to be merely personal, connects the song to a long tradition in American popular music in which the beloved becomes a vehicle for experiences that the culture more formally reserves for the sacred. Nathanson draws on that tradition with evident sincerity, and the result is a song that operates on both a straightforwardly romantic and a more expansive emotional frequency.
For listeners encountering Nathanson's work for the first time through this song, "Come On Get Higher" served as an introduction to a songwriter whose primary gift was precisely this kind of emotional directness. His earlier catalog rewards discovery by demonstrating that the quality of feeling in this song was not a commercial calculation but a genuine artistic constant, present across a decade of work that preceded this particular breakthrough moment. The song's meaning, in this light, is not just about a specific romantic experience but about the possibility of bringing that experience fully to the surface without apology or distance.
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