Local lovers of contemporary folk rock and Americana music have been flocking to Buellton for Standing Sun Wines’ concert series Standing Sun LIVE, which has been showcasing ensembles and singer songwriters concertgoers are used to seeing in Los Angeles or the Bay Area. The intimate performances are colored by the setting: an art-decked industrial wine storage area at Standing Sun, where artists pick and sing songs among towering stacks of wine barrels.
The upcoming concert features folk duo honeyhoney, which includes singer, violinist, and banjoist Suzanne Santo and guitarist and singer Ben Jaffe. The duo is no stranger to Standing Sun, having performed a packed house last year, Jaffe explained.
“They have this great big, beautiful room with all these vats of wine. You could jump into an ocean of pinot of you wanted to,” he said. “The room is high enough and small enough that the sound has a kind of character to it, and with the smaller crowd you don’t have to blast the sound, so it’s a fun kind of intimate thing.”
Jaffe and Santo perform primarily with acoustic instruments, especially when they play without a band, as they will be at Standing Sun. This is honeyhoney at its roots: just the two of them with their instruments and voices. It’s a sound the duo has worked at developing for years, through the songs they’ve written alone for the band and the songs they wrote in collaboration, Jaffe explained.
“What’s happened is individually our songs have gotten stronger, and that makes up like 50 percent of the record, and then the other half of the record are songs we wrote together, and we got better at that, too,” he said. “And we have gotten better at making shit up together, kind of like improvising together, which is hard, and it’s been a long road to get there, but it feels good.”
Sanko and Jaffe are very particular when it comes to how they feel honeyhoney should sound. The group debuted its first album on the Lost Highway record label, which is well known for distributing albums by Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, as well as the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. The group has been associated with that traditional country, folk, and bluegrass sound for years, Jaffe explained, but the two have never felt wedded to the genre.
That can be heard simply in the way honeyhoney sounds as a duo. It’s unlike any bluegrass or traditional folk music you’ve heard, but the influence of those styles is undeniable. Part of that comes from the songwriting, Jaffe explained, but another part is the way they approach the instruments.
“I played drums—drums were my first instrument—and I came to guitar later,” he said. “So most of my guitar playing has been trying to not play it like a drum. I knock guitars out of tune a lot because I approach it percussively, but a lot of it is because most of the time we don’t play with drums, and so I carry that rhythm as something important to the sound.”
Neither Jaffe nor Sanko was born into a bluegrass family, but both grew up listening to bands like Nirvana, so to mash the two worlds together isn’t a taboo they mind breaking. This has placed honeyhoney somewhere on the wide spectrum of Americana folk/rock/pop music, but you’d be hard pressed to give them any one particular label, much like many of the other artists who have been showcased as part of Standing Sun LIVE.
It’s the freedom to change and morph that excites Jaffe and Sanko. The two are nearing completion of a new album, Jaffe said, which will serve to push honeyhoney’s ship further into uncharted waters—though at the same time, neither collaborator would deny the power that the old and traditional music carries, nor the influence it’s had on their work.
“There’s always going to be two factions: You are going to have traditionalists and the innovators, with everyone existing on a spectrum, but you need all of it, both sides, for things to be alive,” Jaffe said. “My dream is just to be an artist. I happen to be a musician, but I want to make art.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 22-29, 2015.