On Friday the 15th of May we had the joy of going
back to Toybox studios. The last time we were there was back when we recorded
'Falling for Orpheus', which was when we first fell in love with the studio.
It was great to be able to work with Stef Hambrook as our
producer again – as well as providing lots of coffee to fuel Anja's caffeine addiction,
he just ‘gets’ our sound, which is so important to us and makes the world of a
difference.
We spent a long ten hours in Toybox, but once we had started
we just couldn't seem to stop! It’s always so fun recording new material and seeing
something that started out as just a small idea growing in front of us. It’s
also exciting to wait and see what everyone will think!
It turned out to be a
wonderfully efficient day, and we returned home with more than we could originally
have hoped for – always a definite bonus.
Although we won’t say too much about our new recorded
material yet, keep an eye out on our social media sites and website for more
updates!
Seeing as we have been working on a lot of ‘behind the
scenes’ material this month, here’s an update on what we've been (and will be) up
to!
We kicked off the month with a wonderful gig in the Colston
Hall Foyer. It was a pleasure to be back, and we were so delighted with the
amount of support – it really does mean a lot.
Last week we took a trip to Devon with film makers Scott
Quinn and Corry Raymond to create a new music video. Director and editor Scott
has been working his magic on the footage and we can’t wait to show everyone!
What we've been spending most of our time on is preparing to
go into the studio tomorrow. We've been recording a range of demos for a while
now, trying to shortlist which new track we all feel is the right one.
All of us are so excited to record again, and those
pre-studio butterflies are starting to settle in! It’s going to be so exciting
to be able to share something new with you, so keep a look out on our website
for information and updates.
Wow, is it really 2015 already? What can we say? We’ve seriously
had an amazing year and it couldn’t have happened without everyone that was
there to support us along the way. One of the most momentous things to happen
was our transformation from Wolfhound into The Honeyfire.
It sure has been a big year for us, and here are the
highlights of our 2014.
We entered the year with a lovely gig at The Louisiana supporting
I Am Horse on the 3rd of January. This was the day we realised we
wanted The Louisiana to be the venue where we would perform our upcoming album
launch. The atmosphere and sound were exactly what we were looking for, and it
was a great gig to kick-start our excitement for the upcoming year.
We released our first single in 2014. ‘Starlight’ was a song
we wrote about the winter and the first song we recorded in a studio (Factory
Studios). Along with Scott Quinn and our manager Craig Joiner we filmed the
music video and released the song on the 8th January. Judging by how
different we look, it seems like more than one year ago!
We then locked ourselves away for a couple of months to
prepare for the recording of our album! Before we knew it April was upon us and
those two weeks in the recording studio still stand as one of the best
experiences we’ve had.
The album was recorded at J&J Studios with Jim Barr, and
Nathan Long as Jim’s assistant. Recording with Jim was a fantastic experience
and we are so thankful for his time and effort spent on our album.
And so, through coffee fuelled laughing fits, delicious
food, too many silly photos and of course a lot of hard work, we came out with
the recording of our first album.
We were soon brought to our first festival of the year, The
Acoustic Festival of Britain. This one gets a special mention because it
was so different to any other one we played. Mostly this was because of the
fact we stayed for the whole weekend, and those freezing nights on the hard
ground won’t be easily forgotten! On a more positive note – what a wonderful
vibe this festival had! We all had a fantastic time looking at all the various
stalls, experimenting with new looks and enjoying the beautiful and brilliant
music there was to offer. A truly great start to the festival season.
One of our favourite gigs of the year was yet again at The
Louisiana supporting She Makes War along with DIONVOX. She Makes War has become
one of our big inspirations and it was an honour to be given the opportunity to
play with her. We had great fun both playing and watching, and the gig ended in
a great way when we were invited up on stage with She Makes War for some
musical collaboration.
Having now recorded our album, we had to start thinking
about all the visual and physical aspects of it. We spent some time
brainstorming and experimenting, and after a couple of photo-shoots the new
look of Wolfhound was born!
A lot of people ask us about the name change and why it
happened, so here’s the story. It was at this point in our progress that we
felt the change was necessary. Compared to only the beginning of the year we
had changed massively, both as people and musicians. And to think of the
original Wolfhound, Sally and Natalie in their younger teenage years writing
more acoustic songs as sisters, seemed so different that we started to feel like
the band we had progressed into should have a name of its own. We learned a
useful piece of knowledge during this time – trying to think of a new original
band name, which meanwhile won’t disappoint your followers and supporters, is
VERY difficult! Oh how we racked our brains and thought of name after name that
had already been used somewhere before. We still remember the Eureka moment; we
were in Devon filming a video and we were sitting around the dining table after
midnight, tired and hungry after a long shoot. In front of us were written a long list
of words we all liked that would hopefully motivate inspiration by putting them
randomly together. ‘Honeyfire’ was mentioned and we all realised how perfect it
was. It suited our music and style perfectly, ‘Honey’ representing the times we
laugh together, our love for pretty things, our friendship etc. and ‘fire’
representing the darker shade of music we write and the way we don’t think of
ourselves as your typical ‘girl-band’. So there you have it, an in-depth
explanation of how we became ‘The Honeyfire’!
During the time we were creating our new image, name and
website, we released our second single of the year, ‘Road Signs’. It was the
first song we were releasing from the album which was actually kind of scary,
since we didn’t know what to expect as a reaction to the new sound that had
developed since our last EP ‘Tales of Truth and Lies’. We spent a few weeks
with a camera in the car, filming through and out of the window whenever we
found ourselves driving in Bristol. We took a trip across Clifton suspension
bridge especially for the video, which was really beautiful. Thankfully we had
a great response, and thus we started planning video number two – Dreams.
The Dreams video was a long work in progress. We can’t
complain though, because we are so pleased with the end result. It took a large
amount of planning and preparation; we spent several weeks creating and
perfecting story boards, making handmade costumes and planning the locations where
we would film. After we had collected up all our weird and wonderful footage, it
was cut down and edited into exactly the kind of visual match to the song we had
imagined. For those of you who didn’t know, ‘Dreams’ is about the strange and
disturbing dreams we have, and that is what we wanted to video to represent.
We started an interesting project this year, a collaboration
with songwriter Richard Williams writing a song about the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice. Richard has also co-written a song with musician Zoë Wren about the same
theme for the project. We recorded our song 'Falling for Orpheus' in Toybox Studios,
and it was really nice to be recording in a studio again, especially one as
lovely as Toybox. Falling for Orpheus will be released 17th April 2015. Details to follow soon.
While creating the video and recording Falling for Orpheus, we started coming closer and
closer to the last stages of finishing the album. Having designed the album
cover, layout, CD and booklet we were ready to send the designs off to be made.
Along with the albums we also had our own badges made, which was
another first!
And so we get to the end of 2014. The albums arrived safe
and sound, and we will never forget how it felt to hold them for the first
time. The video for Dreams was released, and we want to say thank you again for
all the wonderful and supportive comments we received about it.
This left us to get extremely excited and nervous for the
last significant event of the year, our album launch on the 11th of
December at The Louisiana. All the hard work we spent working towards it, the
large amount of planning and rehearsing really paid off in the end.
It was one
of the best nights of all of our lives and we still can’t quite believe that it’s
over. It marked the end of a brilliant and eventful year beautifully, and we
are so extremely thankful to our families, our managers Craig and Steve, Jelli Records, and everyone who has helped and supported us along the way. You are
all so lovely and we wish you a wonderful 2015.
We are back from an extra day of recording at J&J studios, though we wish it was longer – we’re not quite ready to say goodbye to that lovely studio yet.
We had an amazing day adding the missing pieces to our album and we could not be happier with the results. All of us are so excited to share the finished product with you all; our new material is unlike anything we have previously released.
It’s been fun for us to giggle at each other and our ‘misheard lyrics’: “The warthog has risen above the kite that holds this world to leather(?!)”, which has helped to release stress from some hard-working sessions.
Speaking of what we've been up to this week, we are almost ready to go into Toybox Studio next week to record our song about Eurydice and the Underworld. It has been (and will continue to be) a very interesting project, which has been different to any other projects we have worked on in the past. The founder of the project, Richard Williams, wrote the original chords, which he then gave us to complete the song.
We have enjoyed writing lyrics and melodies to fit such a fascinating myth, and creating a song from another musician’s original music has turned out to be a large responsibility, which we are honoured to have been trusted with.
The rest of this week we will be finalising the song, and we will update you all after the recording.
Quick reminder about our acoustic set in the basement of The Louisiana this Friday for THE FLUX. Tickets will be £5 on the door. Doors 7.30pm, music from 8.30pm. More details here.
