Q&A: Care and Collaboration with Christa Joy and The Honeybees
HOLDING MUSIC WITH CARE IS HOW — Christa Joy approaches her creative work. On August 24, she released the self-titled Christa Joy and The Honeybees along with her band, composed of Lisa Marie Ellingsen, Timothy Bowles, Jason Smith, and Tom LeBeau. For Joy, her artistry and personal experiences are intertwined which gives the album its unique charm — along with its high-spirited humor and lightness.
Throughout our conversation, Joy praises her band, describing each of them as hardworking and kind. From this, it’s clear that Joy is considerate about the energy around her, making space for kindness through intentional choices. She recalls the origin of The Honeybees, saying she wanted “so little ego in the room.”
She added, “I want[ed] to record with people who [were] really big-hearted.”
On the album, Joy writes about her children (“God Gave Me Two Babies”), both easy love (“Again and Again”) and challenging love (“Tear Free”), and there is a cover of the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man.” Throughout, Christa Joy and The Honeybees employ humor, presenting a perspective of finding light in the dark.
For example, “Omens” is an amusing and upbeat song despite the integration of 13 stereotypical “bad” omens, including “a black cat sitting at my feet.” Joy tells me that, funnily enough, strange malfunctions would occur before each performance of the song. By allowing themselves to keep it light, Christa Joy and The Honeybees present an album that is equal parts playful and reflective.
Overall, the album is a representation of the relationship between Joy and her band itself — it showcases the unique beauty of collaboration that comes from finding people who are like-minded, and making them a priority.
The Honeybees are a band with a lot of heart, and Joy was indeed a joy to converse with about the self-titled album, the necessity of collaboration, honoring grief, and more. Read the interview below.
LUNA: I’d love to know more about your journey as an artist. Could you walk me through the years?
JOY: My dad gave me a guitar before I left for college, and I brought it with me. I wrote so many terrible songs for a long time (laughs) that my dearest friends withstood and they bore through those years of early songwriting. I think the impetus for writing at the start was a deep longing to express meaning in my life and in the world I was inhabiting and waking up to as a new adult. Then I fell in love and — of course — there was a huge amount of motivation to impress the person I had fallen in love with. Much like so many other lovestruck people, I think that was a real motivation for me. I’m not certain my spouse was impressed with my first songs that I wrote about him, but we have three children together and we’re still together to this day.
LUNA: It worked!
JOY: It worked (laughs). Then as time went on, we were in California and I was becoming a kindergarten teacher, and my mom was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. I wasn’t writing about any of that but there was this huge impact as we were settling in the Bay Area, finishing school, starting careers, and my parents [needed our support]. We ended up moving back to the East Coast, rather abruptly at the end of that school year. On the drive from California to Massachusetts, I was writing. I recorded my whole first album, Ready or Not, during the time after we’d moved back. On the second album I released, Daughter of Your Last Art, there were a couple of songs which my mom said, “Don’t put those on this album because you’re contemplating my mortality!” She loved my music. She loved my songwriting. Songwriting at that point was therapy. It was a way to have catharsis and movement within grief. Grief can feel like a very old friend after a while. My brother [also] just passed away and I really am accepting this is a part of my path. Death, dying, and impermanence are important factors to being alive and human. Then we decided to have a baby, and Tilden, my daughter, is such a philosopher. She’s so awake and observant. I stayed with her a lot that first year and we would take walks. Her attention span and her ability to observe, it woke up my senses again, and I could experience things not through grief, but through her eyes. She pulled me out of that and gave me a chance to write new songs. I started listening to country albums my dad used to make us listen to in his truck and pulled up [my mother’s] old vinyl. I was falling in love with Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and just imbibing all of this classic country. [I liked how] simple country music can be, chord and form wise, but also how it can be poignant, too. It can get out these really universal themes that are actually hard to write about.
LUNA: You previously told me how the pandemic slowed things down for you, and this is your first album since 2019. As an artist, what have you noticed has changed since then, and how have you brought those changes into your new music?
JOY: I think I’ve allowed myself to have a sense of humor. The world has been so wrought with conflict, disease, and unrest. People’s lives have been turned upside down in so many places and in so many ways, and that continues to be true. My life was no different in some ways, it was also turned upside down by the pandemic. We couldn’t even find a daycare that was open. It was through that process that gave me an ability to recognize when a door was opening and when it felt like I could walk through it, and also giving myself permission to be brave enough. With the music, I let myself be funny and find my sense of humor like “God Gave Me Two Babies.” That song is so kitschy (laughs). No one can understand unless they’ve had twins — you change one diaper, then you get the next baby and you change another diaper! So when I wrote that song, it was funny to me and I was like, “This is what I’m making right now.” I gave myself permission to walk through that door of writing a few silly songs. I think it’s hard to write a funny song, but we need to lighten up at times because life can be so challenging and hard.
LUNA: Let’s talk about The Honeybees — Lisa, Timothy, Jason and Tom. What’s the dynamic like?
JOY: Lisa, the lead guitarist, and I have played together for so long in different projects. She’s like the heart of the band, such a hard worker, and she cares so much about her musicality. She’s also a songwriter, but she doesn’t want to be in the spotlight. I have to really convince her to lead a song! She always has my back. In the rhythm section, Jason on drums is very well known in our area and is an amazing drummer. He always has a joke [and knows how to] keep things light. Tom has been a multi-instrumentalist since he was a young boy, and he has been on a stage his whole life. He’s our bassist, but he could play any instrument up there. He’s tremendous at bass. Our pedal steel player, Timothy, is our secret weapon. He’s been in the industry a long time and our paths crossed through his daughter. She put in a good word and he returned my phone call. He’s unique as a pedal steel player, like his tone and his choice of how he’s playing. So that’s the whole band. They’re just really nice, kind people.
LUNA: My personal favorite on the album is “Again and Again,” but our favorites change with time, don’t they? Whether it’s a song in a collection, an artist we connect to more at a specific time in our lives, it’s always evolving. For you, how does your relationship with your releases change over time? Does it?
JOY: The songs I publish feel like collections. They feel like a photo album. But as I’ve played live with different groups, I’ve brought the songs to different musicians, and they change so much and become something totally different. There’s a song on Ready or Not called “Long Straight Road,” which is about my dad. He’s a truck driver and it’s just this trucker song, but in the first few years of The Honeybees, the band loved that song. I hadn’t played it since around 2013 and had forgotten about it but our drummer — he was really into jam bands — would start jamming out on that for ten minutes at the end [of the performance]. It became this totally other song and fun to play again. It’s delightful as the person who wrote it to see it have a new life.
LUNA: Collaboration has a big impact on your process. On your Substack you mentioned the artist who did the cover art for this album, saying that although they’re across the pond, your music was destined to meet their artwork. How would you describe the importance of collaboration in your work?
JOY: It’s everything to me. I think without the realization that interconnection makes things meaningful, music loses its meaning. When I discovered live recording, it was like figuring out a missing piece of the puzzle. I was doing so much in isolation and in grief. I began to record live with people and bring a song of mine into a group, and then [learned to have] the trust and faith in others to hand it over. [It’s] not just hiring the best people for the job, but hiring the kind of people who know how to take care of a song and take care of each other. It’s pretty similar skill sets. If you can care for other people and you’re a musician, then you can care for other people’s music.
