Culture
The Honey Dewdrops Headed to Eclipse Company Stone March 9
By: Emily Votaw
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Laura Wortman and Kagey Parish are The Honey Dewdrops, a husband and wife Americana duo tackling matters of the heart and the soul through deceivingly sparse tunes and their perfected harmonizing vocals. On Friday, March 9, the group will come to Eclipse Company Store (11309 Jackson Dr. The Plains) for a performance that will start at 7 p.m.
WOUB’s Emily Votaw spoke to one half of the group, Parish, about the formation of the group, their forthcoming record, and coming to southeast Ohio.
WOUB: Can you tell me how you and Laura (Wortman) met?
Kagey Parish: We met in college, playing in a rock band that essentially just played classic rock songs for college parties. That band didn’t last very long, but we did realize that we liked to hang out with each other and play music, and we both had a big appreciation of many different types of acoustic music. Everything from traditional folk and bluegrass to more contemporary stuff, like Neil Young and Lucinda Williams. So we started to play that kind of music together and we got into using harmonies together and right away we really loved everything about that experience. We took a lot of cues from some older styles of music and started to write our own music. We made our first record in 2009, and it’s been about nine years since then and here we are.
WOUB: How long have you individually been musicians?
KP: So Laura grew up in a musical family, her parents were singers and they loved Americana and folk music and that kind of stuff, it was always playing in her house. Laura has also taken guitar lessons from a pretty young age, like 5 or so, whenever she started going to school, really. And I have always loved music, although my parents weren’t very musical themselves. There was a lot of music going on so far as what was on the stereo and what I heard on public radio – so a lot of jazz and classical music and then on Saturday nights there was an Americana show that would come on after Prairie Home Companion, and I would listen to that. I started playing guitar when I was 12, and I have just always loved playing and listening to music.
WOUB: And 2015’s “Tangled Country” is your most recent album?
KP: Yeah, it is, we are currently working on a new record that will be released later this year, so we are playing a lot of those new songs live.
WOUB: Very cool, can you tell me more about the new music? You guys have been playing together for nearly a decade, is there anything new you’re trying?
KP: You know, being a musician is like a constant growing process. I think what makes being in a band interesting is how you have to sort of constantly find new leaves to turn over. As the years go on for us, it’s about trying new things as a duo, which has always been an interesting format for making music. We certainly like to listen to all types of music, but there is something very special about the duo sound, to me. When I listen to a duo, I hear space, and that sort of emphasizes each sound a bit more. There is a certain clarity of sound and I can dig into the harmonies and how they blend together. It’s so different with a four or five piece band, or even in a trio, just one more person than what we typically work with. When you’re in a duo you have to focus on your role, if Laura is holding down the melody, I need to focus on really holding down the rhythm. We have to play off each other, and I really love that, and it hasn’t gotten old for us. As the years go on, we start to add more improvisation to our live shows, and we challenge things that we used to tell ourselves just didn’t work in our music. And lyrically, I feel like the content has gotten wiser. The music that we have written has always been about people for people, it’s highly personal, but current events are on our mind, too. We live in Baltimore, and the riots that happened three years ago stuck with us. We’re writing from a place of ‘figuring it out,’ for lack of a better phrase, trying to figure out what the world is today and how we can say that.