Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Kagey Parrish, one half of the husband-and-wife folk duo The Honey Dewdrops, about the origins of their name, matrimony and the creative process and recording in a barn.
CP: How many dates do you and Laura perform, annually?
KP: We do about 100 dates per year. I think when this year ends, we’ll be at exactly that much. Next year, we might do a little more, but that’s where we’ve been for the last couple of years.
CP: Where did the name Honey Dewdrops come from? Why not the Venus Flycatchers or the Pitcher Plants?
KP: (Laughs.) Well, there are a couple of things going on there. We really love old music, especially old-time and old country and old bluegrass music. One of the forerunners of those genres would be Uncle Dave Macon, who made a name for himself on the Grand Ole Opry. His nicknames was the Dixie Dewdrop, and there’s something about the name “Dewdrop” that we really liked. That felt like a way to connect this with the tradition.
Also, there have been a couple of different bands with that name. There are the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and we’re riding on the same thing they’re doing. They have the Chocolate Drops as a black string band, and we though Honey Dewdrops would be an interesting way to portray ourselves. We also used to live in Scottsville, Virg., which was the home of the original Dew Drop Inn from “The Waltons,” where John would go to drink, I guess.
Then, there’s the thing of being a married couple and the Honeydew thing. It works on a couple of different levels.
CP: What are yours and Laura’s musical origins?
KP: We were both very interested in music from early ages. Laura started singing at a pretty early age along with her parents, who were singers from away back in the day and always encouraged her to sing. They exposed her to a lot of singer/songwriter and folk music when she was younger. That singing tradition for her was there from an early age.
I was primarily a guitar player when I was a kid. It was something I was always interested in, and I kept it up in high school and college. We met by playing together in a band in college, and it just happened that we kept doing it and formed a relationship out of it.
CP: What was your impression of Laura when you first met, musically?
KP: I think we both were pretty into what the other was doing. I was mostly playing guitar at that time, and she was just singing – she wasn’t even playing guitar in that band. We both knew we had similar interests and that we just seemed to work out well together. It went from there. We initially wanted to put together a bluegrass band, but the duo worked out well, so we’ve always done that.
CP: At the time, was it strange to find someone your age with a similar interest in those older styles of music?
KP: It wasn’t so much strange as it was just wonderful. We both went to college in a small town in Virginia, so there wasn’t a lot of diversity going on. It was mostly college frat party music, which is cool, but it was great to find someone with interested in acoustic, older styles of American music. It was great. We just kept enjoying it so much that we started doing it for a living.
CP: How long have you been doing it professionally?
KP: About a year and a half now. We quit our day jobs in June 2009. We’ve been doing it full-time since then.
CP: Was the performing chemistry immediate or did it develop over time through that other band? What was that group’s name, by the way?
KP: Oh man, I don’t know the other band even had a name. It was a college party band. We played all rock covers, and we didn’t play that much. But being such a small town, it was inevitable that we’d be able to find time to get together and try to make some more music.
We pretty much hit it off from the beginning and knew we wanted to take it in a more acoustic direction because that was the music that was really catching our ears and that we felt most compelled to try and make.
CP: Do you write mostly independently or together?
KP: For the most part, it’s collaborative writing. One of us will come up with an idea, maybe a chorus or a set of verses or something, and we’ll sit down and try to work on it together to make a melody and put chords behind it.
There are times when we’ll write a song all on our own. That does happen, too, but for the most part, we collaborate together. It’s been a good system for us so far. We usually find that if one of us has ideas about words or melody, the other has ideas about a different part that helps to complete the song.
CP: When you write lyrics, do you tend to approach them differently than Laura? Do your songs have a different tone than hers?
KP: Not totally. I would say we’re usually thinking about the other person when we have an idea. What I mean is thinking about the other person having a role in the song. So what we come up with is geared 95 percent of the time to what will work with both of us playing.
Usually, the tone is fairly similar. We have some different ideas – we’re two different people – and we come up with some different stuff, but maybe one of the reasons we work so well together is that we have the same thoughts some times. I think we’re kind of connected in a way so we come up with some similar sounding and feeling stuff.
CP: What are some common sources of inspiration for you and Laura?
KP: There are a lot of them. A lot of them are based out of that older sound from the dawn of folk recording from the ’30s and ’40s and on up from that. Woody Guthrie would definitely be one of them. Utah Phillips from a little bit later on would be another one.
I like to think of some of those early bluegrass guys like Bill Monroe are singer/songwriters because they did all the things you have to do to be a song/writer, and then they went out and performed them as well.
Along with a lot of old blues in the black tradition, too. I’ve taken a lot of looks at how and why blues songs work, and I feel like there’s a lot of great emotion in that stuff. I would say we’ve even taken a listen to the old jazz standards, and they’ve been influential as well, old Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz singers from that era.
Then, there is a lot of contemporary stuff, too. One of the great things about traveling is you meet a lot of people doing the same thing like we’re doing writing our own songs and performing. There’s also some other contemporary names, one of them most recently we’ve been into is Mary Gauthier. She’s a singer/songwriter, who spends most of her time on the road. She started being a singer/songwriter when she was 35 years old, which is kind of unheard of, but she has great songs.
CP: What is your goal when you write a song? What does it have to accomplish for you to consider it a success?
KP: The easy answer to that question is it has to be are really good song. What that means is that it’s heartfelt, and it’s something that just about anybody could relate to. I would say that that’s the most important thing. It’s a song that, even if you don’t like our kind of music – duet/country-sounding/harmony singing kind of stuff – the song will still have an impact on you.
Whether I’ll be able to do that or not, I don’t know, but that’s my goal when I sit down to write something. I’m looking for the lyrics to be meaningful to a wide variety of people. What else is pleasing to me is the music to be interesting and different from what you’ve heard before. Maybe least important but still on the list is something that’s fun and challenging for us to play, since that keeps us on our toes.
CP: Does being married aid or hinder the creative process?
KP: Well, I think a little bit of both. Sometimes, it’s great. Sometimes, we can sit down at the kitchen table and write a song and have it pretty much hashed out in a couple of hours or so. On the other hand, it can be hard at times to spend a lot of time together with that other person. Most of the time, it’s good.
I would say that for the most part it’s really good because Laura and I have the same idea a whole lot. It’s mostly really good. There are challenges you’ll get into with any partner. Living and working together is not only a full time job; it’s a challenge, but it’s a good challenge to have.
CP: Your debut album “If the Sun Will Shine,” received a pretty positive response when it released last year. What were your goals for that project when you went into the …barn to record?
KP: (Laughs.) We were actually living in that barn. We were making our first CD and about to hit the road full time. We had a bunch of songs, and we looked at a bunch of records from some of our favorite musicians. We were talking about, “What would be a great way to make our first record and make this collection of music come alive?”
We decided, after listening to these recordings and talking to a bunch of friends doing the same thing we’re doing, that rather than going into the studio and have someone produce the record and do it that way, since what we do is homemade music that has the feeling of home in it, to make it in our home and have total control over turning the knobs and setting up the mikes and getting the sound exactly how we wanted it to be. A lot of people are making records that way nowadays, and a lot of them sound really great and have a good feeling to them.
We decided to go that route, and it was a really great way for us to go. We had a realy good time getting to record at our leisure. We would come home from work and record – or not, if that’s how our day was. We didn’t have a time limit on it. We were able to work on it as slowly as we wanted to. Even so, it only took us a couple of months to put it together.
It served our purposes. We really like the sound of the record. We feel like it had a homemade quality. We feel like the spirit that comes out of making a homemade record like that suits the songs well. We recorded it all live with just a few mikes set up. We loved it.
We ended up doing the same thing with our second record, which we put out in August. We did it the exact same way because a lot of the music we love was made that way with folks standing around a mike getting the right take. We didn’t really doctor it up too much. The music is what it is. I wanted it to sound real. What we play in front of an audience is pretty much what it sounds like on the record.
CP: It sounds like approaching it that way would accurately reflect that live experience. Was that a goal for you when you started?
KP: Yeah, it was really important to us. We didn’t want to change what our stage show is like to having something different on the record. That is really the thing we do, and those are the sounds we’re interested in and think are important. Doing it that way allowed us to keep everything together.
I’m not saying that we won’t go into a studio ever, but being able to control it at the beginning of the first records we make has been good. We’ve been able to learn how to get the sounds we want to come through the mike and into our recording software. It seems to translate pretty well to putting the music on the radio and how people respond to it.
There’s a lot of music out there, and lot of it is super-produced and sounds really good, but this is another way to make music that’s powerful in a different kind of way. That’s really nice, so we’d like to keep it that way.