They don’t call it soul music for nothing. Along with its sister genre, R&B, and its carousing cousin, funk, soul touches you down inside and makes you feel good. It’s just that simple. San Francisco trio Honeycut throws all of that in the pot and adds a dark, icy element that produces a danceable, opaque vibe that gives listeners goose bumps.
“For me, it’s soul music. It soothes your soul. If people ask what the vibe is then I say it’s darker,” says keyboardist RV Salters, one third of the equation with Tony Sevener on drum machine duties and the frisky tension of singer Bart Davenport. Honeycut met through mutual friends at a day job that “involved musicality” as Salters puts it. Eventually, they began casually jamming to see what would come out of it when lo and behold; they were inked to Quannum Projects and released their first album, The Day I Turned to Glass this past fall.
Honeycut by Michael Alan Goldberg
The album was recorded at their home save for the live strings and horns. “It was a very gradual process. We really started about three years ago by just kind of throwing ideas down but we were all busy doing other stuff, so it was kind of a casual thing for us to be working on Honeycut just kind of on and off,” reminisces Salters. “We’d just be reconvening, working on a beat and then the next time, around a month later maybe, Bart would come back with some lyrics for a track and we’d talk about it, track it and see where it went. It may explain why there is this thing to the record, that people tell us anyway, that’s kind of hard to describe. But, at the same time, it’s easy to latch onto. When you have time to work on something and expand on new ideas that are not necessarily done according to blueprint then you got time to experiment, and you have time to take a little perspective and go back to the track and make sure that it’s something you can whistle in the shower”.
The rather deconstructed song writing process ultimately made the album what it is. Salters determined the overall riffs and chord progressions while Sevener molded the rough drum patterns and Davenport penned the lyrics. “We each take the song and take it home, work on our part, then share it with the others. At one point we all kind of put everything in the pot and stir it together,” says Salters.
The Day I Turned to Glass could be described as “funk noir,” which retains the cool, suave manner of Prince but also channels the bumping beats of hip-hop, a murky peppering of ambient down-tempo and a shadowy, uncouth cinematic shell which Salters attributes to his being a “huge fan” of soundtracks, citing a laundry list of names like John Barry, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Goldsmith.
For me, it’s soul music. It soothes your soul. If people ask what the vibe is then I say it’s darker.
-RV Salters on Honeycut
Photo of RV Salters by Salim Madjd
Honeycut
“At the very beginning we had some songs that were super cheerful and happy and we didn’t end up keeping a lot of that because we found that our voice is really more with the darker kind of soul aesthetics,” Salters offers. “We didn’t just meet around the table and go, ‘Alright, we’re going to make a record that sounds like this style or that style.’ We got all these various influences from all the people and tried to be lucent and just let there be freedom do its thing and let all of these various elements kick in and see what would stick or wouldn’t stick.” It all seems relevant when inquiring to the origin of the band’s name. “We thought it would be sweet as honey and sharp as a knife”.
Honeycut high-fives their sonic roots by way of using older model keyboards and organs such as the timeless Fender Rhodes and clavinets, which Salters fancies “tricking it out” by putting the keyboards through a Korg Kaos Pad or a whammy pedal so Honeycut can “take old sonics and bring them into the future”.
Honeycut
“As far as my part goes, I started playing the piano pretty young. So really the piano, the actual instrument, is all about that weighted feel on the keys and the very kind of physical relationship that I have with it. It kind of bites back and I kind of need that from my keyboards. The clavinet has its own way in how it’s very rhythmic and funky,” Salters explains about the vintage keyboard with a rubber tipped hammer that frets guitar style strings to make a staccato sound when the keys are hit. “It’s just got a very strong personality. The Rhodes has that, the Hammond organ has that, [too]. I love the sounds. I love all those keyboards and the tones you get out of them, but, at the same time, my thing is to try to use them in a way that is a little different than they’ve been used before. Using a clavinet just straight up and the normal way has been done so well by so many people before.”
RV (born Hervé Salters in Paris) knew about quality music from a young age. When he was a child in France his father frequently took business trips to Africa. Salters was blown away at the young age of ten when his pops brought home a copy of the seminal Fela Kuti record Expensive Shit. Later on in life, Salters toured with Fela’s son Femi Kuti and was “slapped in the face” to the point where he decided to ditch the day jobs and devote his life to music while on a tour stop with Kuti in Brazil opening up for D’Angelo.
As for the labels thrown at Honeycut, Salters is quick to brush them off. “Music is music and words are words.”
