Breakout artist honestav speaks about his unprecedented success, the memories his family shares, his troubles with addiction and the love for his fans.
By Katharina Moser
It is three hours before show time, and on the worn black leather couch of the Button Factory, honestav is sitting widelegged and widegrinned, a mischievous smile radiating from the rugged face that still wears the busted-up lip from a rough night out. His back-length brown hair is tied up in a messy bun, its curls caught in an unruly fight against the Irish October rain outside. Honestav has made waves in the music industry over the past months, and these waves have carried him all the way across the Atlantic, to Dublin. It is honestav’s first-ever Europe tour, and all dates are sold out. Outside the venue, fans are already queuing, but honestav is taking time for a backstage chat between soundchecks, import modelos and outfit changes. “I wonder how the people look like here, those who listen to our music. They probably look just like us”, honestav says and smiles to his band mates, long hair, tattoos and all.
Honestav hails from Missouri, which explains why some call his music more Midwest emo than alternative. He is widely known for his sophomore album “Sweet American Boy”, preceded by his debut “Hara-Kiri”, but most notably, he has garnered popularity for his break-out hit “I’d Rather Overdose”, and recently, his collaboration with mgk, “Crash First”. “The emotion in music comes out of the instruments for me”, honestav says. “But to be a good writer, you have to live life. Whether it’s good or bad, writing comes from experience.”
Indeed, many of his songs are weighted with emotions and memories where only the possibility of a shared experience through music may offer some relief. Honestav’s music is a book made of tropes straight out of the tragedy of the human condition: families broken, connections shattered, love lost and bodies strained by a life of drug and alcohol abuse. His songs, it appears, are made of grief, but they are not for grief: in an odd twist of art, they are a celebration of all that remains, and a display of contagious strength. “With the music that I put out there, I just want it to be so true to myself, connected to who I am right now as a human being. I write all the time, and I probably have 500 unreleased songs on my phone. Not all of them are sad. But those are the ones that connect with people the most”, honestav thinks. “It’s hard to tap into that emotion sometimes. I’ll be in there crying sometimes. When I write a song, it’s really like that. When I wrote ‘I’d rather overdose’, I was in the studio bawling my eyes out. But I not hard. It’s more of a blessing. I have to do this or I’m gonna go crazy.”
And what would happen if he didn’t write those songs? “I’ll be dead tomorrow. If music got taken away from me, I’ll be dead tomorrow. I swear to God. No exaggeration”, honestav says with emphasis. “Music is the only thing I’ve ever had in my whole life to feel anything, to feel like a regular human being. It was pretty tough where I grew up and pretty violent, but when I put my headphones on, I could just be by myself, feeling good for however long that song lasted. I remember that I stole cigarettes from my parents as a ten-year-old kid and locked myself in the bathroom, sat in the bathtub and made the water as hot as I could stand, and played music. And for those moments, I felt like a superhero. I felt like everything was fine. Music was all I ever had.”
As much as his passion for music, his ambition to be an artist began early for honestav. As he tells us, all his brothers were in a band. “I had four brothers, they were all skaters and they were all in punk and screamo bands. The guys that I looked up to were just some punk-ass fucking teenagers that were making a bunch of music, so my journey starts there.” Honestav wrote music since he was ten or twelve years old. “It starts there. It starts from wanting to be like my older brothers.” And when one day changed everything in the family, music was there. “When I was twelve, I wanted to be a star. When I was fourteen, all of that turned. Music was now who I was. So the journey went from wanting the big stage to it’s just who I am. And eventually people started listening to it. Of course, I want to take care of my family and have a lucrative career, but it’s not some big goal for me to be famous”, honestav ponders. “This is who the fuck I am. I can’t do anything else. There’s no way we’re getting around it right now. If everybody stopped listening to my music right now for the rest of my life, I would still be doing exactly what I’m doing right now, because it’s like what I am.”
His brothers certainly molded the youth that made honestav who he is today, but nothing shaped him as much as the loss of one of them that would come to haunt his memories. “I grew up with a mad bunch of boys in the house. We had one sister, but our household really matched the cliché. We were arguing, we were joking, we were breaking glass and slamming doors, we were bleeding, we were wrestling, we were playing football and baseball. When my older brother got depressed, we didn’t even think twice about it”, honestav recalls. “When I was fifteen years old, I was staying with him. One day he called me when I was out and asked me to come home. And I knew something was wrong, but I was just his little brother, and told him I was hanging with my homies and not coming home”, he tells us. “When I got home, I found him hanging. I was a kid knowing that he like called me because he needed somebody, and I was not there. I knew the whole story, about his girl and the drugs and his drinking, and I did not answer the phone again. That just shaped everything about me.” Honestav falls quiet for a second. “Now, if I wake up in the morning and feel any type of way, whether it’s happy, sad, or whatever, I have to say that to somebody near me. If someone irritates me right now, I’m gonna say it, because all I can think about now is I have to get it out because of what happened to my brother.”
His brother’s death shaped the whole family for years to come. “For nine years, my dad was just a shell of himself, and he turned into someone that didn’t really exist. I watched that, and then my dad killed himself.” All that shaped the way honestav makes, and perceives of, his music. “But I don’t make music to get out. I don’t want to make these songs talking about everything because I want people to feel bad or because I want to be a sad emo kid. It’s because I feel like I have to, or I’m gonna die”, he says. “You know, before my brother died, I was playing baseball 300 days a year. I was the quarterback of the football team. I was into sports. I wanted to be like the cool kids from my school. Had my brother’s death never happened, I would probably be an asshole, like before. I used to make mean jokes all the time. I was a bully. After my brother died, I realized that I can’t be that human being anymore. So it really did shape everything about me.”
Despite the weight of that, the memory of his brother, and his passing, now feels like another lifetime to honestav. “I was a kid then. And he was a kid, too. Now, I love kids. I love seeing kids at my shows. All I think about is that the teachers are probably annoyed at kids in school because they’re loud in class. But they don’t know you got shit at home. It was crazy to be a kid and no adult every asked if you’re okay. Every time I would get in trouble, nobody ever thought of thinking that maybe we needed to work through the things that happened to us.”
One of the songs telling a story of loss is honestav’s most popular “I’d rather overdose”. The artist has a history of drug use and abuse he openly shares with his fans. How do you overcome those experiences, and how do you talk about them, we ask? “I’m on drugs right now”, honestav says, and in that moment, we are clear on why he chose his name. “It’s hard for me to talk. That song made everybody think that I was about getting sober. But truthfully, I struggle with it right now, today just like yesterday and the day before that. I don’t have any answer to get better at managing my drug use. It’s all I’ve ever known. Anytime I have ever seen anybody in my life, any adult in my life, have any type of emotion, they got high. Whether they were happy, whether they were sad, whether they were angry, they got high. So that’s just inherently my first thought, no matter what, all the time. If I have a good emotion, I feel I should get high. If I’m sad, I feel like I should get high. If I’m tired, I think maybe getting high will make me go to sleep. If I need energy, I think maybe getting high will give me energy”, honestav. “I have no answers. It’s hard to tell anybody to get sober because I’m not sober. But I do now know that there’s limits and being aware of my struggles, I’m growing and I’m getting better. I’m a better man today than I was yesterday. I do less drugs right now than I did a month ago. I’m climbing and I’m getting to be that person that I want to be, I’m just not there yet.”
Despite that honesty, the song “I’d rather overdose” symbolizes a certain beauty in honestav’s life. “Music is beautiful because the same exact words can mean something totally different to me and you”, he says, referring to the hook of the song. There he sings: Can’t be without you / I’d rather overdose. “With that, I’m not telling anybody to get sober. It’s me saying, look dad, the way that you went out, I want to go out the same way. That’s how I wrote it. I didn’t write it thinking everybody needs to get sober. I wrote it thinking about how I watched two of the people that I love the most kill themselves over a woman, and so in my head at the time when I was writing that song, I was thinking I’m gonna do the same thing.” But that was not how the world heard the song, honestav understood quickly. “Suddenly, the internet made it into a sober anthem. And that is beautiful. It may have saved my life, being that beacon for people. That they look at me and they see themselves and they’re getting sober. That has sobered me up a lot. It’s helped me in a lot of ways.”
It would seem that listening to his music would cause quite some stirs in his family nowadays. But that is not the case, honestav says. “I don’t got family like that. My mom’s never said one word to me about my music. I don’t talk to my stepmom at all, ever. I don’t got a dad. My sister loves me, but we don’t talk about music. My brothers might give me a hug every once in a while, but they don’t listen to my music. This shit hasn’t fixed anything in my family. I still don’t got family. I’m in Ireland right now for the first time ever, exploring the world because of my music, and I haven’t got a single text from anybody in my family or a single call saying, good job, I’m proud of you. Nothing. And that’s cool”, he says. “I don’t have harsh feelings for that. That’s just how it is. We were raised like that, too. We don’t give a shit about anything, and that’s the bad part about me, and that’s the great part about me”, honestav says. “I don’t give a shit for real. I sing those exact words in my song with MGK. And I’m not saying this to be cool. It’s hard for me to give a fuck. I don’t know how to give a fuck. I want to care, but I just literally don’t. And it’s the same thing for my siblings. I’m not mad at them because they don’t talk to me about my music or give a shit, because they don’t give a shit for real, like me.”
And this right there might the one thing we just don’t quite believe about honestav, despite his piercing, at times powerful honesty. Because as the sounds swell in the Button Factory in Dublin and a thousand people scream with anticipation, and then with enthusiasm as the show finally starts, that is all we see – an artist that cares: about his music, about his fans, and about creating two magical hours of joy and connection. Despite, or maybe exactly because of his story, neither honestav nor his performances are manifestations of grief. In a few short hours, we will have the impression that honestav is a man of humor, of spirit, and of kindness. And his concerts are spaces of joy, a party of connection and chaos, rowdy, sweaty and full of kinship.
And that, honestav wants to preserve for the future. “I want my music to be more consumable. I want to learn how to write a song in a way that means the same amount to me, but is more relatable for people that maybe don’t look like me or grew up like me”, honestav says about his future. “I want a big-ass stage. I want Madison Square Garden. And I want to make sure that the person that everybody is seeing in front of them is truly who I am. I’m so scared of everybody hating me that if you hate me, I want you to hate me because you hate who I really am, not because you think something that’s not true. So in these years to come, hopefully I’m becoming a better man and my music is better. And I’m playing venues with 20 000 people and I own a fucking big-ass house with 100 acres and two ponds and a bunch of dirt bikes”, honestav says, and grins widely – a grin that describes who he is in a single motion: someone who beat all odds.
In the end, honestav’s artistry is not only a work of music, but also a work of character. With every fiber, his personality is both a nod to and a middle finger against the horrors of this world. And his music, for so many of his listeners, makes these crumble into thin air, leaving behind nothing but beer, sweat, community and ecstasy.
