Music Times contributor Ian Holubiak and his band Oh Honey are on the road, traveling to SXSW and across the country to spread the musical word. Ian will give us a look into the life of the touring act as part of the Tour Journal series. Stay tuned for more refelctions from the road.
Brooklyn seems lost in the winter madness, clad in trench jackets and closed storefronts, leveled by snowy tundra. What lingered on the ends of Manhattan's sister borough brought the band (Oh Honey) and I no joy.
We didn't see much of each other, the band and I, in the week dividing our tour with our newfound label mates Finish Ticket and budding Aussies The Kin, who just completed a national circuit with the ubiquitous songstress P!NK and her faux-punk carnival-crashing tour. The winter wedged us into our apartments, mine devoid of heat until a nasty conversation with the landlord (not atypical of a Brooklyn winter) remedied a broken boiler.
Yet we packed our bags and hit the road to Nashville. When you have a group of guys and gals fighting for their own sovereignty in the form of a bench to sleep on, you usually rise to the helm to steer the van. I volunteered to drive, gladly.
We had just gotten signed after our show in Philadelphia, Thursday, February 27, at World Café, to Atlantic Records. I wasn't in the room and saw little of the transcript that came after the signing, though.
I often wonder if the only girl in the band, Danielle, has some sharp words to describe of her male counterparts. We like to fart around and indulge in that kind of talk (you know what I mean) but the idea of what a woman could do to relegate our male ego is unnervingly subtle.
We've often described South by Southwest (SXSW) as a worldwide spring break for the musical populace, centered in the literal hotspot of Austin. And here is where I began pondering the palpable musicianship and artistry that seems to pervade this new landscape of the indie artist bastion, which is propelled to the frontlines, taking bullets along the way.
"Music in Context," I wanted to write in an interview with Annie Clark, humbly known as St. Vincent, who is currently coercing a wide array of punky pink hipsters and mustached men with a brilliant symphonic follow up to her first album. I dig Annie, and it would have been a great interview if I'd gotten the chance (sadly, a lowly Brooklyn writer has little clout and hardly anything to stand on).
But this idea of "music in context"... of music contextualized in a specific way that conforms to certain tastes and ideas, yet unwaveringly brings new concepts and sounds to scope.
I was watching my Welsh friends in Until the Ribbon Breaks perform (it was amiss to see technical difficulties undercut their performance, but as a peer I can empathize and respect the choice to abandon a half-working set). And it wasn't until the head songwriting enfant Pete Winfield drew up a silver trumpet (mind you, this is an electronic group, brilliantly tailored with R&B-esque rhythms and thoughtful voice-concoctions, or singing) that I came up with the notion.
Had a passerby seen the set from that specific trumpeteering point they may not have seen the allure of a horn in the mix. Instead, like most of the indie dreck that somehow gets a stage to stand on, the reappropriation of horns and other "worldly" instrumentation has been an aesthetic device, something to drive their musical vehicle (which is total bullshit).
But a touring musician has a lot of time to ponder the rules of musicianship and formulate their own sovereign for the autonomous notions of musical freedom. SXSW may be a hub for the criminally insane (since all of us musicians are batshit crazy, and a drunk-driving scumbag, in an attempt to allude police, wholeheartedly ran down two innocent mopedders and nailed a few other pedestrians in the pursuit) but it proves to be a successful festival premiering some serious talent.
We performed alongside Meg Myers at Rainey's for some Neiman-Marcus heads, I had a photo taken for a fashion blog that I couldn't understand the name of.
The performance was special for us in Oh Honey. An outside stage is a new feat for us but we seem to tackle a lot of the challenges a new touring act faces with sincere poise. But Meg Myers was a vision, with her Oedipal songs of "killing your mother" that my tour manager and I were drooling over. That is what these festivals are about, and if a small brown-eyed songstress can quip these massive ideas of sex and violence, spun into an authentic song for her own device, then we should all be so lucky to see it. St. Vincent is in that league, so is '80s-revivalists The 1975, so is Until the Ribbon Breaks and so are a select few others.
But now we pack the van and go to Denver. Shockingly our drive lay paved with playlists of Bob Dylan, The Tallest Man on Earth and the Honorary Title (by the way you should check out Night Terrors of 1927, Jarrod Gorbel's latest project. They played after us and brought it home nicely), which lends itself to something much bigger than a tour with your best friends.
But all I really wanted to ask this South By was where in the hell was WU LYF?
