Here it is, as described: half-unsure on the matter of Is This The Right House, I stumble my way toward some star-drenched suburban lot and am cheerily greeted by two chipper, fuzzy-faced boys who insist on giving me a honey stick upon entry. I pay my fee and walk the weed-broken side-alley into somebody’s backyard. I don’t know who’s. The main things here seem to be dirt and conversation. People carrying apparently sourceless cans of White Claw, jumbo-sized and ubiquitous, form listless constellations of pre-show chatter. Everybody already seems to know each other. Soon, these groups will convene to form a dense plaque, a sea of earthy-tones that exhausts upward streams of cigarette smoke, college-aged acolytes subsuming a mound of dirt on top of which, in brightly red lighting, Juniper Honey play.
“The good ol’ formation story. That’s Donovan’s specialty.” And so lead vocalist Jake Heese, whose favorite Beatles album is tentatively Revolver, rolls the question over to the group’s drummer, Donovan Hess. The story of how they came to solidify in San Luis Obispo is simple. Hess says: “We were playing for a couple years down in Orange County, that was during high school, and then we were like: ‘Hey, you know what? We’re growing up. We gotta go to college.’” They shed members of their previous band and became Juniper Honey, a SLO-based act.
Juniper Honey, a project currently encompassing eleven songs, uses gentle soft rock to explore themes of romance, ennui, and late-adolescent confusion. A four-piece outfit (the bassist, Josh West, couldn’t make the interview), they have steadily deployed a series of singles throughout 2023.
The transition to SLO was a welcome change. Replacing Southern California’s abundance of easily-accessible venues with the more piecemeal house show scene present in SLO, says Hess, lends itself to a more intimate and vibrant color of audience: “The house show scene here is really, really cool. We’ve never really had anything like that. It’s a really easy way to build your fanbase: who doesn’t want to go to a show at a house, doing hooligan activities with all your mates?” The professed volatility and camaraderie of the common house show audience, according to Hesse, doesn’t intrude upon the audience’s respect for the music: “I love it up here, where there’s a perfect balance of energy. Jumping around and stuff, but also people really paying attention to the song. I’m into the prettiness of a song over the crazy make-a-mosh-pit-run-to-the-middle thing.”
I think I see that, having wormed myself up to the front of the crowd: how the audience’s level of energy, completely uninterrupted in its intensity, bends and distorts according to the band’s tightly-composed riffs and rehearsed hijinks. There’s a respect in the knowledge that you are attending a rock concert on ground not made for rock concerts and, in fact, ground that serves as somebody’s personal property when it is not tumultuously upholding rock concerts, and that respect is easily compounded by how technically Juniper Honey’s glowing soft-rock emits itself on stage: Hess’s smooth stutter, or guitar player Cason LeSueur’s deft handling of Looking at You’s intro.
“Imagine,” I front: “Mindscape. Someone in an indie band is panicking before their live set. What do you say to comfort them?”
“Cason, what would you say?” Hesse presses. “Do you ever get nervous before sets?”
“This is a targeted question. We did a few out-of-state shows, and in one of them there were some higher circumstances involved. I got really nervous and threw up outside. I was sweating all over the place. We try to over-practice so that you can just relax on stage; I’m not really as nervous about being on stage. I don’t really have stage fright in front of people. It’s just: the anticipation kills me. And, so, there’s nothing you can do about that. That’s my advice.”
To which Hesse adds: “You put your hands on their shoulders and just go: ‘suck it up.’”
Hess: “A bit of the ol’ ‘stop puking backstage!’”
The pressure may or may not be justified, looking at the audience’s inability to let incorrect notes tarnish the night’s goal of having fun, according to LeSueur: “It boils down to: you can honestly put on a smile and dance on stage. 95% of the crowd won’t have a clue if you’re playing the wrong notes or not.” Whether or not the wait truly necessitates unruly feelings in the gut, Juniper Honey has their attention on the idea of sudden release. This is evident in their latest music video for the single “Another Morning”, which has the band sitting rigidly in a room, each member avoiding the others’ line of sight, until the song’s apotheosis brings forth a sudden passion and everyone starts playing their instruments.
On the video, Hesse says: “This one was the first that I actually wrote myself and directed myself. It was kind of cool. I was going for that tense feeling of suspense and feeling trapped up until that release point in the song. I was trying to visualize everything that I was feeling when I was writing the song and the reasons behind making that song.”
A large component of Juniper Honey’s charm lies in the emotional myopia of each track: nostalgia that fails to undermine the stunting totality of memories, shuddering bright and red, that haunt the mind before sleep. The band promises to maintain this honesty while rolling into the production of an upcoming album: so says LeSueur, “I think this stage in our lives, and in people’s lives in general, has the potential to be one of the most polarizing and changing. You can be the loneliest and the happiest and feel like you’re an adult and feel like you’re a kid all at the same time. You change a ton, and I feel like our music, over this span, has really reflected that. I think there’s a really cool element of putting simplistic, daily, mundane life that everyone relates to into your song.”
“Your songs grow with you, your writing style matures as you mature or immatures as you immature, sometimes. It’s all kind of intertwined: Writing and growing,” adds Hesse. The songs written for the upcoming album have already withstood this change, and now the quartet is shuffling into the studio.
The band will be releasing an album in the coming months, and in Hesse’s words: “We’ve been working on this next project for a really long time. And the songs have already changed in themselves from the start to where they are now, and they’ll probably change more as we go into the studio, so compared to our current discography, there’s definitely some stuff that has changed. But, also, some stuff that doesn’t change.”
There does seem to be some established, unchanging house show etiquette. Some of the more agile attendees are now finding methods, some more intricate than others, of harnessing the dividing fence that humbly envelops the band. On the other side, a shrouded child watches attentively, sullenly, from his parent’s high patio. Realizing I can forever be a piece of the visible crowd from which this kid was destined to be apart, I excitedly attempt a climb. It is a noble effort, but I ultimately fail, sliding against rough wood back onto the dirt. The faces above me notice, and point their eyes sympathetically. One of them lends a hand.
“What is the best thing a live show can be?” I ask.
“I want to say experimental,” Hess posits.
LeSueur then says: “I want to say ‘motivational.’ You ever watch one of those insanely good movies or see one of your favorite bands? You walk out of the movie theater or you walk out of the venue floating a little bit, like: ‘I want to go home and turn my amp up and finish that song I’ve been writing and I want to be on that stage. I don’t know if ‘motivating’ is the right word, but that feeling. Those have always been the shows that I remember.’”
“Along those lines: the audience. Just as much as they’re liking the band, they’re also liking each other and the energy around them… Everyone’s your friend. If you’re sitting here and looking across the theater over there, all the way over to whoever else – it feels like everyone’s connected because of the band’s energy. Not just the band and the audience but the audience and the audience,” adds Hesse.
“I’m never going to say ‘experimental’ again.”
“Why don’t you unpack that?” Me, on journalistic duty.
“By ‘experimental’, I mean-”
“He likes Pink Floyd,” Hesse says.
“Something we do is throw a lot of jams into our set. That’s one of my favorite parts of the show. That ‘motivational’ thing you’re talking about – I’ve seen bands do things very similar to what we do. It’s like: having an intro and an outro and everything like that. Like: ‘woah, I’ve never heard this before. This is sick.’ That kind of adds to the ‘motivational’ thing, I would say. Originality.” And so Donovan Hess stands vindicated.
Juniper Honey thanks the crowd; I hug them after the show. They seem to be capable of the silent mass-beer materialization that remains completely lost on me, now just another drifting orb in the net of comfortable conversation securing the stage.
You can find the band at @juniperhoneymusic on Instagram, or on all major streaming platforms.
Dom Mary Harris is part of our editorial staff. She wrote the article. Anders Rosengreen is part of our art team. He made the graphic.
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