Premiere: Easy Honey Play Two Unreleased Peach Fuzz Songs Live from Stone Studios (Video)
Earlier this week, I linked up with Selby Austin of Easy Honey and we talked Peach Fuzz over beers on the back porch of The Royal American. The new album was recorded with Wolfgang Zimmerman at The Space and is set for release on November 19th.
Today we’re excited to share a video featuring two new songs off Peach Fuzz, “Gotta Get Back” and “RNRF”, recorded live at Stone Studios in Upstate NY. The band recorded these during a few days off between shows on their most recent tour, along with live takes of the rest of the songs on the album that will gradually see the light of day in the coming months.
For now, though, feast your eyes and ears upon these two bangers, which exemplify the dual-frontman aspect that is one of the main strengths of Easy Honey and something that the band focused on bringing out in the studio this time around. In this video you’ll hear one song penned by guitarist and frontman Darby McGlone, “Gotta Get Back”, and the other, “RNRF” is a Selby original.
Watch below, and read on to get the scoop on Peach Fuzz and what it was like working with Wolfgang, or “Daddy Wolf”, as Selby calls him.
After a failed attempt at connecting with Wolfgang a few years back, when they had been working out the songs on Maritime Love Affair, Easy Honey were finally able to link up with the local (and perhaps soon-to-be national) legend when they were ready to start recording Peach Fuzz.
As is the case with many great things, including this interview, it all started over a few beers.
“We finally were able to connect and we went and had beers with the whole band, and dude, we just got along really well,” Selby recalls. “He gets along with a lot of people, I think, but we had a good ass time.”
When the time came for Easy Honey to enter The Space, they had most of the songs written and ready to go, but there were certain things that Wolfgang did to help nudge the band in the right direction in the studio.
“Especially being in this dual frontman band, with me and Darbs,” Selby continues. “All four of us have that creative output, but especially me, Darby, and really Charlie too, of like, having a fucking opinion. And then him [Wolfgang] being a nice balancing voice. And he has a good way of it.”
Keeping the hard-headed opinions of dual bandleaders in check is important, but something that was given equal importance here is the juxtaposition between the two frontmen. Easy Honey has always been a combination of songs written by Selby and songs written by Darby, but with Peach Fuzz they played even more with that contrast.
“I thought it was cool that Wolf was really able to play the like, dual frontman shit. He was like, Selby, you be the psycho guy and Darby, you be the cool guy smoking cigarettes.”
This psycho guy and the cool guy smoking cigarettes often come together with pieces of songs they’ve written separately, and they manage to mash them together to create music that works, even if the initial ideas are completely different.
“We both come with two hands full of Play-Doh and somehow it will fuckin’, get formed,” Selby says.
On the first day at The Space, they live-tracked the bones of the entire album. The rest of the days were dedicated to finalizing two songs per day. This is unusual, as most bands tend to focus on one song per day, but Easy Honey developed a system that worked for them, and led to some laughs when listening back at the end of the day.
“We would start in the morning with the rager,” Selby explains. “Then we’d have lunch, and afterwards we’d be feeling a bit lifted, if you know what I mean. And then it would be the psychedelic afternoon.”
It was during one of these psychedelic afternoons when they came up with the name Peach Fuzz, for both the album and the custom guitar pedal that they’ve recently released.
“Darby was saying something about fuzz, and then Wolf was like, “Did you say ‘peach fuzz?’, and then we all just died laughing. That’s where the name came from, just thought someone said peach fuzz.”
This is the kind of comradery at the core of Easy Honey, and when combined with the outside-the-box philosophies put forth by Wolfgang, it led to a lot of creative ideas bubbling to the surface. The first of which was ditching the metronome while live-tracking, something that the band was inspired to do by the ebb and flow present in the music of Pinegrove and others.
“There were maybe two or three moments in the album where Wolf would be like, ‘Oh hey wait a minute, it’s speeding up here. Just speed up with it,” Selby explains. This gave them more of a free canvas to work with, allowing the band to play what they were feeling at any given moment.
The final result is a free-flowing rocker of an album, ripe with wobble and fuzz and reflective of the creative sweetness that came alive in the studio. According to Selby, it’s “Just like Pet Sounds“.
Stay tuned and hear it for yourself on November 19th, and head out to the Royal American on November 20th to rage it out with Easy Honey along with Goldpark and Virginia Man at the album release show.
