BY EMILY HARRIS
PHOTO COURTESY OF HONEY CREEK
Milwaukee D.I.Y band Honey Creek is defining the alternative space following the release of their debut album A Whole Year in Transit. Following the release of their EP, The Time it Takes, which came out in 2018, the band was able to create a single cohesive and full-flowing record with A Whole Year in Transit. Singles “Green Line,” “The Time it Took,” and “Paper Roses” are featured on the album alongside the title track “A Whole Year in Transit.” The band was able to speak to us about the recent release and what we can expect from them after quarantine.
Thanks for talking with us, guys! Can you tell about the beginnings of the band, as you started out in 2016?
Honey Creek: “Thanks for having us! Honey Creek was formed from a couple Milwaukee D.I.Y. bands. Our original lineup consisted of Donnie (drums), Sam (guitar), and Dylan (bass), as well as our friend Dominick who was our original singer. We put out our demo, ‘I Don’t Know What I’m Doing’ and ‘The Time it Takes’ with various other second guitarists. After about three years of playing basement shows and a couple of Midwest weekend tours, Dominick decided that he wanted to go in a different direction so we went on a short break while we worked on putting together a solid lineup. After a few months we met Chris (vocals) and Ellee (backing vocals, guitar) who were in another Milwaukee band, and settled on this lineup. This lineup has been playing together for about a year now.”
How has the Milwaukee music scene influenced your punk rock roots?
HC: “When we just started getting into D.I.Y. music, Milwaukee had a very thriving house show scene, so we were all brought up on the idea that as long as someone had a basement, we could throw a show. The resourcefulness of the scene and playing music for the sake of building a sense of community and influencing the next generation of musicians are probably our biggest takeaways from our Milwaukee D.I.Y. roots.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF HONEY CREEK
As your plan for being a band was cemented in the notion of playing basement shows, how have you kept to that goal?
HC: “We continue to love basement shows and feel incredibly comfortable in that environment. Honey Creek in general has a very D.I.Y. ethos to it and we always jump at the opportunity to play in those spaces with our friends in the Milwaukee scene and at various spots across the U.S. We’ve met a lot of cool people and many of our closest friends that way. While we feel very comfortable in a basement show environment, we had the opportunity to play a couple of shows on our most recent tour that broke us out of that comfort zone. It was a cool feeling to see some growth in that manner. However, D.I.Y./basement shows continue to feel more like home.”
Your debut album A Whole Year in Transit released in April this year. How did the process of creating a full record differ from that of your earlier released EP, The Time It Takes?
HC: “It was much more challenging as we wanted to bring out a more cohesive and thought out theme via AWYIT as opposed to writing songs for the EP that weren’t as connected to one another. We took a lot more time demoing out songs, listening back on them and reworking things, which we feel gave us a much better understanding of the parts that needed to be changed. This is also our first time writing a release with this current line up and we couldn’t be happier with the result.”
The last single you dropped before the album was “Paper Roses.” Why did this song feel like the perfect last piece of the puzzle before the whole album was released?
HC: “We all felt that the song was one of the stronger songs on the record, but the music video we did for it was definitely our most ambitious music video to date. We spent the course of two months painting the backgrounds of the scenes in our living room and preparing other props and costumes. We rented out a studio at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and set everything up and filmed it with our friend Carter Green for over eight hours. We were very proud of how the video turned out and felt that it was a very good introduction to our music.”
Your single “Green Line” has over fifty thousand streams on Spotify. What inspired the drawn-out guitar and hard drum sound we hear in it?
HC: “‘Green Line’ was one of the first songs written for the record. We wanted to head in the direction of making songs that were a bit punchier and more upbeat, while continuing the energy from our previous releases. It originally was much darker and heavier sounding but we had to essentially recreate it and make it a bit more upbeat to fall more in line with what we felt was the Honey Creek sound. While we had an idea for what we wanted the finished songs to sound like, Derek Moffat at 608 Studios really understood our vision and made that vision a sonic reality.”
The last song on the album is the title track, “A Whole Year in Transit.” Why did you decide to close the album out like you did?
HC: “Originally ‘Fast Times at Farwell House’ and ‘A Whole Year In Transit’ were two halves of the same song. As we were finishing up the record we had the idea of making the first and last song musically relate to each other so the album felt more like it had a hard beginning and ending. The lyrical content of ‘A Whole Year in Transit’ was the last part of the record that we wrote and we grabbed parts from every song on the record to relate to it as a whole. We felt that it gave everything a nice bookend.”
What song would you recommend someone to listen to in order to understand who Honey Creek is, both lyrically and sonically?
PHOTO COURTESY OF HONEY CREEK
HC: “‘Green Line’. The lyrics to that song are very personal to us and we feel like it is a very good representation of the mindset we were in while writing the record.”
Once quarantine is over, can we expect some live shows from you soon?
HC: “1000%. We had a lot of plans for the rest of the year that are unfortunately now on hold, but as soon as it’s safe we want to be back out there playing whenever we can.”