Strange Familia

“Names are weird,” says Strange Familia lead singer Garret Williams, “I tried thinking of a better name for this song. I really did. But this song just feels like honey to me.” Comfort, warmth, beauty, and sweetness are all appropriate descriptors he lists off for both honey and the quiet, unflinching kind of love that inspired the lyrics of the band’s upcoming single before adding, “it can also be a sticky, inconvenient mess.”
Williams and co-songwriter/producer Brecken Jones have been making music together as Strange Familia since 2014 and “sticky” and “inconvenient” describe many of those years—and much of the specific context surrounding honey. After their eponymous debut album earned promising press and fan reception in 2017, Strange Familia hit a series of roadblocks ranging from the worst kind of personal tragedy — the loss of Williams’ daughter — to the demoralizing tedium of laying fiber optic cable every day to pay the bills.
“The song has a confident vibe,” says Jones, “but when I started working on it I was feeling very defeated—work sucked, I wasn’t happy in a relationship, I was starting to feel like I’d lost my chance to live a creative life. So it was more reflective of what I wanted, not what I actually had.”
Like many of Strange Familia’s songs, it began with Jones experimenting with instrumental pieces before passing a rough structure to Williams to see if it sparked anything for him. “Sometimes I know immediately whether or not we can make a song out of it, “says Williams, “this was the case with honey.” The looped guitar chord, piano melody, and hip-hop inspired drums came together relatively quickly, as did the majority of Wiliams’ lyrics, but then life—the sweet parts and the sticky ones—put “honey.” on the backburner.

During what was meant to be a brief hiatus, Jones was selected for the prestigious Mix with the Masters program and got to workshop an early version of “honey.” with producer Emile Haynie (Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, Bruno Mars, Foals) at Studio La Fabrique in southern France. “His feedback was positive, which gave me a lot of confidence,” says Jones, “his main suggestion was to give the piano melody more time on its own.” Rejuvenated by the experience, Jones returned to Strange Familia’s hometown of Salt Lake City with fresh motivation. But the pandemic hit shortly after and Strange Familia’s brief hiatus turned into a multi-year one.

Now, like many of us, Strange Familia re-emerges from the pandemic ready to resume life. The release of honey. marks the official end of their hiatus and the band, now totalling four members, will begin touring in 2023 in support of their second full-length album release. And this time around they understand it will likely contain plenty of ups and downs. Sweet, comforting, but often very sticky too. Just like honey.