Wild Honey Collective returns with ‘Volume 2’

The album was recorded in a very inconsistent series of sessions spanning July 2021 to April 2022, largely in home studios and remote locations. I’d lug around my laptop and an interface and turn the spot into a studio.”

 This month, The Wild Honey Collective unveiled “Volume 2,” another collection of rustic original and traditional music. Over the past year, the newly formed local outfit has made a name for itself in Michigan’s folk circuit. Co-founder Tommy McCord chatted with City Pulse about the dynamic new LP, streaming now via GTG Records. Vinyl and CD pre-orders are available at gtgrecords.bandcamp.com. 

 Given your background in punk and rock ‘n’ roll, what was your initial plan for this new acoustic band? 

Tommy McCord: One of my initial plans for this band was to make, for starters at least, three LPs in short succession that follow the same basic concept: original songs arranged for something close to traditional string band instrumentation, traditional folk songs, and songs written by friends of the band. We can now check two LPs off of that list.  

Who’s on the record? 

The principal founding members of the band are myself, my wife, Danielle Gyger, my longtime collaborator Timmy Rodriguez and a relative newcomer to the GTG Records circle named Dan O’Brien. On both of the albums, the four of us have divvied up the main instrumental roles of guitar, bass and mandolin — with Danielle carrying the fiddle parts and Timmy and Dan alternating banjo, keys, upright bass and various other textures. On this album, we added our old friend Adam Aymor as a full-time member playing pedal steel. We had Michigan session man extraordinaire Drew Howard play steel on the first album, but when we started doing live shows last summer Adam filled that role. Now we won’t ever let him leave. We also have a great pool of talent in the wider collective.  

 When did “Volume 2” start to take shape? 

The album was recorded in a very inconsistent series of sessions spanning July 2021 to April 2022, largely in home studios and remote locations. I’d lug around my laptop and an interface and turn the spot into a studio. Danielle and I have made it a tradition to do most of our vocals and overdubs at my family’s cabin in Bitely, Michigan. That’s where the finishing touches took place before I mixed it at home in Lansing.  

Out of the 12 songs on this album, six are originals written by Danielle, Timmy and me. There are four traditional folk songs, a song written by the late Mark Vella, a New Jersey punk musician that Timmy and I both knew, and a cover of a somewhat obscure Buck Owens song called “There Goes My Love.” The first album was made largely as a quarantine project before we had ever played live. I think it’s audible that we made this new album as a gigging, collaborative unit. 

Why the shift from punk to folk? 

There was a very natural progression to Wild Honey that I think listeners could pick up on if they went through The Plurals “BEES” EP series and the 2019 Drinking Mercury releases. I was definitely well on the path to incorporating more of a folk and country aesthetic into my music. I’m far from the first person to say that traditional country and folk music has way more similarities to punk rock than differences — it’s all music of the people, played by the people, for the people.