It’s Been A While

We’ve never operated like a normal band. When Matt started Honest Iago back in San Diego in 2005 he envisioned it as an anonymous collective of musicians. Each concert would feature a different lineup and instrumentation, with songs influenced by punk but filtered through whatever the artists who were playing brought with them.

That worked incredibly well, for a while. We played shows with everything from a clarinetist and contrabassist to two painters onstage with us. It was an incredibly fulfilling and exciting way to perform, and, being in a college full of musicians and artists, not all that hard to put together.

One of the advantages of the approach was that we didn’t all have to be in the same town to make music. If one of us was living in another city and found musicians we wanted to work with, we could put on an Honest Iago show. That’s exactly what happened, actually. Our core members – Matt, Craig, Hunter, and I – went different directions after college. I moved to London and Matt went to med school. In a way, that didn’t put a dent in what we were doing.

Despite the geography we managed to record and release our first album, Straight On ‘Til Morning, in 2009. It took a LOT of email. In the process, mostly for practical purposes, we streamlined our lineup to just the four of us. There was a while from 2009 on that we were all in Southern California again, and it was a fantastic time of concerts and new material.

Then Hunter moved to Edinburgh. Then Matt moved to Seattle. Then Craig started a career as an engineer. And I started my PhD. And the art that we were making as Honest Iago – at least to the public – seemed to fade away.

That’s not what happened. We never “broke up.” We didn’t publicly release anything because we didn’t have a means to support recording, but we never stopped writing. We’ve been bouncing ideas off of each other and jamming every time we’ve visited for the last however many years it’s been. We even managed a surprise show in Seattle a couple of months ago. And we’re now finally ready to announce that, come next year, we’ll all be in the same city again. Los Angeles. Permanently.

It’s time to record and release all the new material we’ve been working on. It’s time to start playing shows again. A LOT. If you’ve been following us all along, thank you. If you’re new to the story, welcome to chapter one. Everything that came before feels like a prologue to what’s on the way. See you in LA.

1 Comment

  1. We are going to the desert - Honest Iago on February 29, 2016 at 8:44 am

    […] Our last post detailed our plans since we are now all in the same geographic region. […]