The Honey Dewdrops

Anyone Can See, the 6th album from Baltimore Roots-duo The Honey Dewdrops, is a testament to the decade of touring and performing that Laura and Kagey have undergone since their humble beginnings in a small-town Virginia coffeeshop. This album sees the duo returning to its origins in putting together a sonic space of their live performances with two voices and two instruments, similar to 2009’s If the Sun Will Shine and 2010’s These Old Roots. At the helm as co-producer, engineer and mixer is Nicholas Sjostrom (who also worked on 2015’s Tangled Country), capturing in detail, the lush vocals and instrumental play that has come to define The Honey Dewdrops’ sound. At its core, Anyone Can See is a snapshot of living in a time and place that is patterned with disconnection, but also reveals humanity, vulnerability, and the existence of grace.

Near the end of Light Behind Light, the seventh record by the Honey Dewdrops, Laura Wortman sings about light whispering to the mind, “through the wild night, and darkened sky.” It’s an immediate image sung effortlessly, as if into a wide darkness. The feeling that ensues is like you can see in the dark, with perception suddenly possible where it wasn’t a moment before. The song, called Holy Hymn, was written in 2019 and is posed to a friend in crisis, but it could be for anyone, anywhere during the last few years.

Laura and her duo-partner, Kagey Parrish, began writing the songs for Light Behind Light with their friend and collaborator Nicholas Sjostrom, a musician, producer, and sound designer in Baltimore. They worked together in the studio or over dinner through the first months of 2020 with casually paced, productive sessions and looked to record in the studio later in the year.

In-between the writing sessions, Laura and Kagey toured and played some of the new material for their audiences, listening in and feeling how the songs sounded on stage and through microphones. They worked across Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, then out to Indiana and Illinois. Almost every day was a different town, a different room, with different people listening as the duo adjusted and fine-tuned the new songs in motion.

When everything stopped in March 2020, Laura and Kagey adjusted some more by setting up a living-room studio to continue working. It felt like the best thing to do. Lockdown pushed them closer together at home, but the pair found space in it too. They began working at different times, each taking a song in progress and adding to it alone, before passing it to the other. “Having the studio at home and so much time on our hands was very new to us. We didn’t really talk about it. We'd worked in the same room together for years and then suddenly it felt better not to,” said Laura.

Light Behind Light expands the sound of the Dewdrops’ previous records, with more instruments filling out the duo’s experimental folk songs. Sjostrom, while engineering and mixing (as he has on the their previous two albums), plays the piano, electric bass and drums. And Alex Lacquement, a Baltimore multi-instrumentalist, music-educator and community organizer, plays upright bass on four of the nine songs.

For twelve years the Honey Dewdrops have been writing music for two voices and two instruments, mostly acoustic guitars and banjo, maximizing on a minimal format. Light Behind Light invites more instruments into the mix, increasing the range of frequencies and widening the space around the music. It also allows the songs time to travel melodic and narrative distances. You feel that time in the details, rhythm and voices rippling out and then rippling back in, pulling you along in its current. In this way, the songs are invitations to respond, to move with them, to sing along.

In September 2020, a window opened when the Dewdrops could work with Sjostrom and Lacquement in Baltimore’s Clean Cuts studio. There were limitations to how many musicians could be in the room together but the quartet found they could achieve the layers of sounds Laura and Kagey began to hear at home during demo-sessions.

“It felt incredible to be back in the same room with friends. Working in the studio is always special, but that time was different. Everything was different, and who knew when we’d get the chance to work together in the room again? So it felt like a gift to get to be there,” Kagey said.

Isolation and the stall of live music was no easy ride. The band said it was like a roller-coaster feeling the familiar thrill of making new work while the news got worse and postponed shows continued to be put off indefinitely. Laura found balance with backpacking trips into the Appalachian mountains, and she trained for an ultra-marathon foot race. “Playing music and playing in nature are intertwined for me. They’re both expressions in getting better acquainted with my physical and emotional ebbs and flows,” she said.

Light Behind Light does not try to escape the pressure of the time it was made. On the song Heart Wants Kagey sings: my heart wants what he wants / even when I tell him no / I try and try to change his mind / but my heart knows what he knows. “Trying to figure out what to do and how to cope in 2020 was a daily trial by error. Eating fresh-baked sour-dough bread helped until it didn’t,” said Kagey. He finally found himself turning to yoga and long city walks to address back pain that arrived soon after lockdown began. “Pain cuts through the noise and I had to listen to it to find ways to physically adjust myself and to keep being creative. It seemed to be saying: get moving however you can.”

Virginia raised and Maryland based, Laura and Kagey began touring in 2009 and have called Baltimore home since 2014. After their first concert there in 2010, Laura and Kagey regularly returned to work with musicians in the city’s thriving singer-songwriter and string-band music scene. After several years of visiting, they found it to be one of the most open and enthusiastic creative communities they’d come across. “We’re excited to be part of the arts scene in Baltimore. There are so many people layering all their experience and expertise here and there’s so much inspiration to draw from,” Laura said. “During the pandemic, we got the sense that a lot of the artists here were still making work to find a way through the unknown.”

Layered experience, memory and time, desire, love and death all guide the lyrical journeys in these new songs. The opener, Delia, reimagines the Stack O’Lee story in which Stack murders his friend Billy in St. Louis on Christmas night, 1895. The story and song is a folk cannon mainstay and has been rewritten and recorded many times over, and it has a history of inviting play and interpretation. The song focuses on Billy’s partner, Delia, as she goes from lover and new mother, to aggrieved widow, to fratricidal community hero.

“We were interested in the possibilities of telling an old, familiar story in a new way, in this moment. It felt right to highlight Delia. She’s an amazing character who is usually kept to the sides of this story” said Laura.

“And it feels so good to sing and hear her name,” Kagey said.

Moon Pies is made of layers of time. It is one of two songs on the album featuring only the duo. Kagey’s finger-style guitar arpeggiates chords while Laura picks melody lines on an old Gibson LG-1 guitar. It’s as familiar as a folk song, but it’s also not what it seems. The lyrics remember kid memories of summertime with moon-pies and ice-cream, but also the darkness of jokes about waiting to die, the inclination for talking too rough, and storms so severe they cut the power lines.

“It’s a song I wrote the day my dad’s mom died. I picked up the guitar with a lot of memories swirling and realized for the first time how mixed up and messy they were,” said Kagey.

Stoney, another track from the new album, layers memory in a cinematic way. Its chorus is, the Tucson sun shines bright / and the heat of the day don’t last all night / and the hills of cactus roll / down to the border of Mexico. The chords shift from B7 under the word night, to B-minor under the word roll, adding weight to the progression. It’s like a camera slowly panning across a dark desert. The rest of the lyrics remember the life of a guy named Stoney and his dog, and his heart break, and how he was a good neighbor. There’s no real conflict here, just detail. Stoney is revealed, and then there’s the desert, wide but empty, hot and cold, rolling and beautiful and inhospitable.

In the final moments of the last song, Tuning To, Laura’s banjo plays a path over the closing chord changes. Acoustic guitar, piano and harmonic echoes make beds of sound in a reverberant space. It is the sound of a well-mixed trio arrangement. It’s also the sound of musicians listening to each other, giving each other space and time. The song’s fundamental B-flat major 6 chord has a softness to it that you can sit with a while before wanting change. The way Kagey plays it with finger-style rolls makes the static chord move. The banjo melody ends with a long descending line, like stream water falling down one rock, then another. There’s audible motion even after the final notes decay as the melody’s questions find hints of answers, becoming another invitation to the mind’s eye. The camera that watched the water now pans into the distance. It’s dusk, yet there is enough light to see. The air is clear and moves with a breeze that never really begins or ends. It’s a slow, circular current moving memories like images, voices, questions, so the past and future linger together, along with the present, in and out of light.