Upbeat, yet maybe a little beaten-down, Hadley, MA artist Honeyfitz crafts intricate, infectious lo-fi indie pop. I Don’t Need Tennis Lessons, I Need A Therapist is a bittersweet collection of portraits of suburban youth grappling with the eternal questions of life and love, while fending off the creeping tendrils of too-familiar mental illness. With a deft hand and a charming economy of language, Honeyfitz sketches melodic portraits of the (mostly) innocent, sort-of inconsequential moments that – taken as a whole – lay the foundation for who we grow into as we mature.
A high school dropout, Honeyfitz spent his adolescence picking apples, washing dishes, and developing an innovative brand of rural pop music. Grounded in the Western Massachusetts DIY scene, he writes songs that are as at home on the radio as they are at house shows. Honeyfitz self-released two EPs over the winter of 2015-2016. His debut album, Old Patterns, was released in June of 2017. Cutting Your Hair, a self-released four-track EP, was released in June of 2018.
“The vision I had for Tennis Lessons came to me on tour” says Honeyfitz. “I was out with this scramz band that was only interested in listening to heavy music in the van. The Kacey Musgraves album had just come out and it was all I wanted to hear. It’s late and raining, we’re doing a long post-show drive. I’ve got headphones in listening to Golden Hour in the backseat and it just kinda hits me. That album is so produced and polished, but what grounds it is the songwriting. I had a really clear breakthrough about that parts I cared most about, the kinds of sounds I wanted and the kind of collaboration I needed to be doing.”
Glide is proud to premiere both the video and song “Concrete” from Honeyfitz that is creatively inspirational yet ominously bizarre in the greatest of ways. Like Eels, Honeyfitz crafts uncompromising compositions that create an engagingly candid outlook of the world.
“I wrote this song more or less exactly a year ago,” says Honeyfitz. “I made it through seven months of college and decided that was enough. I was in between jobs and spending 10 or 12 hours writing every day. I was sleeping at my then-girlfriends house because she lived on the ground floor and it was an important 6 degrees cooler than my second story room. Some days I drove an hour to help teach jaded elementary-school kids how to farm in order to pay the rent. In a month I would start working 60 hour weeks but I didn’t know it then.”
Though Honeyfitz had cut his teeth (and been embraced by) the underground scene, there’s always been a mild disconnect between the quieter, pop-ier aspect of his music and the louder fare endemic in that world. “Townes Van Zandt is my favorite songwriter. I’ve seen the Mountain Goats six times in the last two years,” says Honeyfitz. “I’ve never been esoteric or loud enough to crush it in most basements.” Though on the surface this may seem an inherent incompatibility, the music Honeyfitz creates shimmers with this tension. “I grew up in this very DIY, indie-rock focused scene, listening to Pavement & Jeffrey Lewis & Yuck, but these days I’m mostly listening to Lorde & Owl City & Drake.”
Hoping to shift his focus from being out of place in DIY scenes to being out of place in more mainstream settings, Honeyfitz enlisted the help of his more talented friends. In November 2017, he collaborated with alternative pop artist Gabe Gill in project called Deadmall. The pair also launched a very-indie label called Not Here, through which the Honeyfitz, Deadmall, and Gabe Gill records are released.
Sharing the creative process proved to be inspiring, and Tennis Lessons features a host of guest musicians – many of whom he lives with. Gabe Gill lends vocals, Emily Carter (Oroboro) sings and plays synth, Nathan Galloway (Snowhaus) added some heavily processed guitar, and Andrew Ring (Snowhaus) plays drums and helped with drum programming. Non-roommates include Eli Heath (of Ohio fusion band Frisson) on bass and organ programming, Judge Russell (Big Mood, formerly of Grass Stains) on guitar, and Riley Feeney (of Kin, formerly Snowhaus) also on bass.
I Don’t Need Tennis Lessons, I Need A Therapist was written and mostly recorded in two different show houses in Hadley, surrounded by other musicians working hard and making big messes. The record aches with an eternal, soft-edged nostalgia for a sense of home. “I wrote this album during my one year of college, at 20, in my hometown” explains Honeyfitz. “I spent the year very conscious of the disconnect between me and all of the other freshmen. All these people were making a new home for themselves, but home for me has always been a slow and unconscious evolution.”
Humans, universally, strive to find a sense of belonging. I Don’t Need Tennis Lessons, I Need A Therapist is an idiosyncratic, polished pop meditation, rooted in lo-fi philosophy if not sound. “This record is about finding those places, people, and situations that make you feel centered and comfortable,” says Honeyfitz. With Tennis Lessons, Honeyfitz has captured that feeling in melody.
Photo by Rain Drooker
