Lucky Dogs
Honeydogs frontman Adam Levy finds the good ending to a stretch of bad luck.
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All the while, the Honeydogs soldiered on, recorded a new full-length album in 1998, and sat and waited for some word -- ANY word -- on their fate with label Mercury. And, of course, none came. For singer/songwriter/guitarist Adam Levy, the past couple of years have been a lesson in diligence, patience, and most of all, frustration.
"I think it's just sort of the broad state of the music industry where you have these huge buyouts and large corporations coming in, and a changing of the guard every few months," Levy said during a telephone interview. "People [were] really scared for their jobs, and they're always looking for the next big thing and they don't really have any long-term perspective on any artists' careers. Nobody cared how much greater this album was from our first record, they just weren't really paying attention."
Despite the lack of direction, or anything else, from Mercury, the 'Dogs picked up guitarist Brian Halverson, and in 1999 added some new material to the album that would later be called, appropriately enough, Here's Luck. And, as luck would have it, Mercury dropped the band, leaving the group in limbo until a tiny branch of Rykodisc called Palm Pictures gave the record a whirl. The rest, as they say, is history.
"From the get-go, from meeting with them, I think we were all struck by the musicality of the label," says Levy. "They've kind of migrated to this label from other parts of the music industry with the desire to get with a label that's interested in music. So when we first met with these people, we talked about our favorite records. They talked to us about what they liked about our music. The courtship was very nice. I felt like, wow, this is a lot of people at a music label that seem to be in touch with what we're doing."
So just what are the 'Dogs doing? Well, Here's Luck, eventually released in January 2001 (a mere three years after it was recorded), received rave reviews all over the country. For Levy, whose songwriting trademarks have always been catchy guitar licks, straightforward, tongue-in-cheek lyrics, and loud, stop-start drumming, Here's Luck marked a major departure. Gone is almost any semblance of the rootsy rave-ups that were splattered all over the band's earlier records. Gone are the pointed, sometimes hilarious, but sometimes crude lyrics like on "That's Me" from the band's self-titled 1994 debut: "You don't need a genius / just a human with a penis / That's me / Yeah, that's me," or "Tell Me" (from 1995's Everything, I Bet You): "How much can you see / with your pornographic memory / can you see my face / or can you cum without a trace."
Levy's writing -- both lyrically and musically -- have grown tenfold since those days, as his songs have become much less straightforward, much less hilarious, but almost all the time brilliant. "There's sort of a moodiness and obliqueness in the lyrics and I think that shifted from the autobiographical to the more collage-y lyrics where I'm telling multiple stories, doing stories where…you could read them in several different ways," he says.
The most telling example of Levy's musical and lyrical growth is "Losing Transmissions," a song recorded in June 2000, which details not only the band's frustration with its former label, but with Levy's personal family life. The song is a musical tour-de-force, and at this point remains perhaps the strongest Honeydogs song on tape.
"'Losing Transmissions,' I wrote that song as kind of a nod for my wife, who's always saying I'm not completely paying attention to what she's saying, [that] I'm always drifting off" Levy says. "And yet the song is also about a loss of connection in general, and the music business."
"Winter of '99 / Borrowing all the time / we robbed Peter / and we sucker-punched Paul," Levy blurts out in the song as a testament to his band's survival.
"Late again / I always blow it / the check's in the mail / but the cogs don't know it / I'm sorry but I'm tuning you out of my addled brain," Levy sings, obviously an apology to his wife and three kids.
But Levy considers "Wilson Boulevard," a tune named after the street this writer used to live off of in Arlington, VA, as his crowning achievement. Levy says he was inspired to write the song after spending a late night in a local hotel, flipping through the channels when he came across a station that was simply recording activity on Wilson Blvd., and believe me, as one who used to live there, there's not a whole lot going on in the suburb of D.C. after midnight.
"[I]t just felt like one of those Big Brother moments, where you have this camera panning back and forth and recording," Levy says. "Who's watching this, I don't know. I'm in a hotel room, this is being transmitted over the city and people are watching this street scene of basically nothing going on all over."
Ah, but Levy makes it sound so, well, peaceful. What with the cascading strings, distant, soothing vocals, and, honestly, such abstract lyrics that you'd never tell he's predicting the end of the world in the song: "The kettle boils and overflows / Paint the prison walls pink / The flood gates are opening / An ivory tower sinks."
I always figured Arlington was near the Seventh Circle of Hell, and now I know.
Luckily for Levy, the 'Dogs, and for any fans of music, the world hasn't ended, allowing everyone to tune in and check out the band on tour over the next few months with the Texas quartet the Old '97s. After that, it's back to the studio, where Levy already has a good chunk of material for the band's next album.
"Its pretty much done," Levy says of the yet-unnamed project. "I keep tweaking it. We've done some recording and demoing…We've got enough material for a new record, plus I keep writing. We're all very eager to get on" with it.
And so are we to hear it, Adam.
RODEO ROB | An expert on all things "alt," Rob spends his days covering the energy industry and his nights covering the DC-area bars. Raise yer glass especially high to this man, for he has contributed to this site constantly since its creation four years ago.