Honey Harper
Atlanta by Ontario by London & everywhere artist William Fussel has unveiled the mercurial & mysterious drifter-twang outfit Honey Harper. Delivering news that the debut Universal Country EP will be available November 10 via Arbutus, Honey Harper shows off those ATL roots through partaking from the fountain of cosmic Americana pop. Over the course of the past three years, Fussel has been working on what some insiders could call the jet-setting answer to Nashville Skyline with a reflective & gorgeous economic song cycle that allegedly was partially composed lakeside in northern Ontario, to scribblings & song skeches drawn in an Atlanta hotel room consumed by paranormal forces, to dreary-eyed 5am east London car-compositions. The result is something something remarkable, as evident in the following preview.
“Pharaoh” sets the listener rambling down the long, weary & winding road that is part of the Honey Harper aesthetic. Like a horse gone loose & wildly galloping from the pedal steel stained sounds from the days of the Grand Ol’ Opry, the classic character of Honey Harper becomes fully formed like some sorta surreal Southwest gothic character described in a Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra ballad. The exchanges between Harper & a lost & found other are relayed like some sort of Flannery O’Connor passage that pits the complexities of human passions against their own humble shortcomings. Honey Harper is both the desperado, the dandy, the damned, the unforgiven & somehow emerges with an aesthetic that exudes the uphill climb called redemption.
But “Pharaoh” was only the beginning, as “Secret” takes that wheel & the pedals simultaneously in a chariot set straight for the oblivion section of the sun. Honey Harper’s “Secret” takes the Cowboy Junkies/Gram Parsons road to nowhere with that spark of incessant dumbstruck wanderlust where Canadian whiskey soaked balladry stumbles like a drunken Icarus driving his luxury ship into the solar sphere. The questions of what love is & more move like a slow-chugging train that displays the discontinuities of connections, beliefs & a heartbreaking ballad that questions the ease by which someone falls both in & out of when the definitions of attraction, affection & attachment are obscured.
From the desk of Honey Harper regarding the making of Universal Country:
Revelations seemingly came and went freely, at their leisure. I wanted to say all these things about honesty and reality however sometimes the truth doesn’t seem so honest at all.
I worked for a long time on this project at opposing levels of effort. So much happened in between the beginning and the current end that it’s hard to say what the exact influences were and and where they came from…and it may be because of some form of influence that I can’t remember them.
The one shining beacon is Bambi and that influence is invaluable, most obvious, and unforgettable.
When all you know how to do is write music it tends to seem like its the hardest thing there is to do. That’s more than likely inaccurate but who are we to determine what is difficult and what is not.
I love this EP and I think its taboos and disregard helps me love it. It was written all over, and recorded in Soho in London at Dean Street Studios with Alex Bietzke.
Honey Harper’s Universal Country EP will be available November 10 via Arbutus.
