Farm Aid First Listen: Meet HoneyHoney

Ben Jaffe and Suzanne Santo of HoneyHoney have an easy rapport with each other that comes from spending long hours on the road and stage, and a deep abiding understanding and commitment to music and one another.

Santo says they love making music together and want to “take the best care of the band” they can.

“We’re partners. In that respect I wouldn’t want to do this without Ben. I don’t know if I could,” Santo says. “All the things we put together are really cool and rewarding especially when it comes to fruition, everything we dream about. Lately it’s been happening. We’re headlining shows and filling rooms and that feels really good. That’s something we earned over the years.”

We’re on a three way telephone call – Santo is in Los Angeles, but Jaffe is hanging out with a friend in Northern California, actually the friend, who introduced him to Santo back in 2006 at a Halloween party in LA.

“It was really fast. We had a quick bond and affinity for each other,” Santo recalls of meeting her future bandmate.

“When we first met each other we were really intrigued by each other and loved the shit out of each other,” Jaffe says. “This has been 10 years of figuring out how to handle that, to have someone so close in your life. It’s a relationship like any other relationship, it’s fucking difficult a lot of the time, incredibly rewarding. It’s all based on consistency rather than change. I’m still intrigued by Suzanne and I love her. It’s the truth.”

Santo breaks in with an “awww” before telling him: “I think you’re really great too and so interesting.”

Our interview includes a lot of this type of back-and-forth between the two, and on more than one occasion Santo throws in a question for Jaffe or vice-versa (making my job that much easier).

“It’s one of those things that has such a good aura around it. You just hear ‘Farm Aid’ and you’re like: ‘I’m down.’ We’re so lucky that they reached out to us.”

The pair is getting some well-deserved attention these days and can count Farm Aid among its fans. HoneyHoney has played a few smaller of the organization’s benefits, including one last year in Texas and another this past August in Sonoma County, California.

“It’s one of those things that has such a good aura around it. You just hear ‘Farm Aid’ and you’re like: ‘I’m down,’ ” says Jaffe. “We’re so lucky that they reached out to us. We’ve learned a lot about the farming community through them.”

He says they were aware Farm Aid supported family farmers and “a purity and quality in agriculture that is not what’s prevailing currently,” but admitted he and Santo are “kind of novices when it comes to this stuff.”

“They’re the indie rockers of the food community,” Santo chimes in, referring to Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young, who started the concert series 30 years ago. “How can you not be a Willie Nelson fan. I mean, come on. I love Willie so much. If we ever get to meet him that will be a really exciting day,” she says.

So, Willie, if you read this, you should help make Jaffe and Santo’s dream come true.

HoneyHoney’s third full-length album, 3, dropped this summer. With Santo’s sultry voice, songs punctuated by her banjo and fiddle, and Jaffe’s guitar that goes from haunting to blistering and back again, the album has a sense of effortlessness that belies the long and twisted path the band took to get the album out. There were three attempts to get it right, including an LA recording session in 2013 that produced a completed album, but one deemed subpar by the pair, leading to them tossing it out.

‘I was talking to someone yesterday who said they thought it must have been hard to scrap the first version, which we did. We recorded it in its entirety and then threw it out,” Jaffee says. “And it wasn’t difficult. It was like: ‘no, this isn’t right. Let’s do it again.’ ”

Santo recalls that when she heard it, she thought, “Oh God!” (she says this with a pained tone of voice) because it didn’t give her the feeling she had wanted.

“We were all on the same page,” she says. “At first I remember feeling really worried and freaked out that we didn’t accomplish it. But then I was also like: ‘we’ll just do it again.’ There was no question. We all worked too hard and have pretty much dedicated the entirety of our lives to this band so… ”

“What do you mean ‘pretty much’?” Jaffe breaks in.

“OK, the entirety of our lives to this band,” Santo responds.

With the help of producer Dave Cobb, the band was able to create the album they wanted. Santo says Cobb was “just brilliant” and pushed them out of their comfort zone, which she feels is “a really great place to be creatively because then you open up all the possibilities.”

Jaffe believes all the hardship and effort it took to get the record made it that much better and really informed the album.

Their career has often swung wildly between amazing breaks – including being befriended by a well-connected French music producer and winning a record deal with Ironworks (a label run by actor Kiefer Sutherland and his friend, the musician Jude Cole) after Santo and Jaffe won a battle of the bands contest – and hard luck. Jaffe says they had their “asses handed to” them on more than one occasion while at Ironworks, which released their debut album, First Rodeo. Their second album, Billy Jack, came out on their own label but was released by Lost Highway Records before it folded (as did Ironworks), and didn’t get the love it deserved. The pair later borrowed money from their parents to try and get their third record out before signing with Rounder Records. Through it all the pair has managed to stay true to themselves, the band, and their vision, which is now paying off.

See Farm Aid’s full September 19 concert line-up here.

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