Artist Testimonial: Honeychurch

Hi everyone, I finished a beautiful project recently and wanted to make you aware of it. The band is Honeychurch. They are from Eastern Pennsylvania and have that 70s AM Gold thing I love so much. Shilough Hopwood is the main songwriter and carried the vision for the music. I had heard his songs through a friend of mine, Mike Monti (Mike was one of echolyn’s original roadies and fellow traveler back in the early and mid 90s). Anywhoo, Mike turned me on to Honey Church and somehow managed to get Shilough and I together. I “got” Shilough’s sensibilities and style immediately. Thus began a long process of recording and making the songs shine out.

The album, Will You Be There With Me, is seriously a breathtaking force of visual beauty. Check it out. It works with the bloom of spring, the lazy hum of summer, the blazing color of fall, and the warm comfort of a winter window view.I just wanted to share this with you. I work with many cool bands/artists and am trying to share the best of them with you. Honey Church is one of these.

Here’s a link: honeychurch.bandcamp.com

I had Shilough write up something from his point of view on our collaboration. Read below.

More to come soon. hope everyone is enjoy the season change!

- brett

Back in 2008, I'd been working on my band's third album for several years already, and it was still a sprawling, unfocused mess. We'd recorded a bunch of drums and other rhythm instruments a while before, and made stabs at some vocals and rough mixes, but at this point a combination of dawdling, perfectionism, and the demands of daily life had nearly stalled the project completely. The problem wasn't that I didn't have a vision; it was that the ideas in my head were becoming increasingly ambitious and unattainable without some kind of miraculous intervention. I felt that these were the best songs we'd written, and I really wanted to do justice to them. One day driving in the car the revelation came to me clearly: I needed to find someone to help me hammer these tracks together - to transfer what I hear in my head into the real world; meaning, someone with the skills and technical knowledge to carve them into shape like a sonic gem-cutter. Later that same day I ran into my old friend Michael Monti, who encouraged me to check out Brett Kull's new studio in Hatboro, PA.

I had heard Brett's music before and I knew him by reputation. He sent me a CD reel of songs he'd recently recorded for various artists, and I decided my prayers had been answered: this was the technical finesse combined with natural musicality that I was looking for. I had the files transferred over to Brett from the small project studio at which I'd been sporadically working, and we started fresh. Due to my schedule limitations we worked in short 3 or 4 hour sessions, often separated by weeks or even months at a time over the next couple of years.

There were several songs I had in mind for the project that had to be recorded from scratch, and I learned that no one records a drum kit quite as beautifully as Brett does. Then there were vocals to edit and re-record, electric guitars, pedal steel, oboes and dobros to overdub, culminating in a magnificent string session arranged and conducted by Jay Ansill. Then came the arduous mixing process. Brett knew just what to do, and he took my relentless obsessiveness in stride.

The record had gotten off to kind of a rough start. I had attempted to pour my love for everything, from 70s country-rock, 4AD slowcore/shoegaze, metal ballads, film soundtracks, ambient electronica, and British folk into the album, and I wanted every detail to shine. With Brett's help, I'd like to think we got pretty close.

– Shilough Hopwood, Honeychurch