The California Honeydrops are hard to put in a box. Their latest LP, A River’s Invitation, runs the musical gamut: jazz, blues, R&B, soul, bluegrass, folk – to name a few. It’s a sound that feels good start to finish, despite, perhaps, being a bit hard to tell your friends about.
“It’s been a challenge because different scenes don’t grab onto you as one of their own, you know?” frontman and founder Lech Wierzynski says of their distinct sound. “I was watching an interview with Prince the other day cause he played a ton of different genres too, he was one of those artists that played a little of everything. They asked him what genre his music was and he said, ‘My music is in the inspirational genre.’ That’s what music’s supposed to do is inspire people. I really resonated with that. It’s just doing what you do and trying to make people feel something and make them feel good.”
It’s a goal they accomplish. The group, currently on tour supporting Bonnie Raitt, are sometimes boot-stomping, sometimes hip-swaying, always fun. Between opening sets for Raitt, they headline smaller venues in the cities they pass through, playing to packed rooms for hours. “Preparing for those two different types of shows is definitely a different thing,” Wierzynski says. “With [Raitt] our set is 45 minutes, and we’re just trying to win over the crowd. We’re very conscious of that, we’re like, ‘Okay, what are we gonna do in the first few songs to try to get them on our side so then we can have fun with them?’ We try to get a little bit of everything in there too, we try to get all the facets of the band somehow covered in 45 minutes.” Adapting, however, doesn’t seem to be much of a challenge – the band plays on the street as well as big rooms, barns as well as bars.
Though the show has a dynamic live feel, it’s not the band’s entire offering that you’ll get onstage. “I do write tons of songs that we don’t end up playing,” Wierzynski elaborates. “We’ll record albums of songs that we’ll never play. For whatever reason. Either because they don’t really sound good live or they don’t fit the show or whatever. To me, it’s like the album’s a whole other work of art cause you’ve got people sitting – they’re in their cars, they’re in their houses – you can give them a different taste of your music and of your art, cause you have them in a different place.”
“That’s fun, that keeps it fresh for us,” he continues. So we don’t always have to be thinking about pleasing the crowd. That was especially true for the last record I think, there was a bunch of tracks on there that we’ve never really messed with live too much. But they were really fun to make. They sounded really good when we were in our living room together, and they sound good on the record.”
He’s referring to the recording process the California Honeydrops have employed for their last couple albums – that is, recording in Wierzynski’s living room. “My house doesn’t really have much more than a living room, which means we can’t all be in there for too many days in a row,” he says. A River’s Invitation was recorded across a span of months, one of the freedoms of not needing to book studio time. This also allowed for an enhanced freedom on the record. “We did write a lot of songs kind of spontaneously in the studio,” says Wierzynski, whose inspiration, among studio jams, often comes from melodies or lines he hears in dreams. “Because you don’t have to be as well rehearsed when you’re just going home, and you have a lot more time to good off on jams and things that sound cool. You kind of explore more.”
It’s an output that demands exploration of your own. Take a listen to A River’s Invitation on iTunes and below, and catch the California Honeydrops at a show near you.