If his 2019 EP “5+10 Love Letter” was Honeyfitz’s homage to driving around on the backroads of Western Massachusetts just before the Hadley native left them in the rearview, “Screen Doors” was supposed to herald his triumphant arrival in the big city.
The timing didn’t quite work out.
The lo-fi musician moved to Brooklyn just a few months before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the city, costing him two jobs and any chance of playing live gigs. On the plus side, he suddenly had a lot of free time, into which he channeled his DIY instincts. Honeyfitz broadened the sonic scope of the songs on “Screen Doors” with ambient sounds from his surroundings, and by asking far-flung collaborators to contribute. He also made videos to illustrate the songs, which he released one at a time, in reverse order, starting in September. (They’re embedded here in the order Honeyfitz released them.)
“None of them were finished till maybe March,” he says by email. “With a total loss of structure after losing both of my restaurant jobs, I found it pretty impossible to start new things, but finalizing these songs was a great way to pass the time.”
Though the songs — “Screen Doors,” “Clutch,” “Wellfleet” and “Dissolve” — are connected, Honeyfitz wanted them to be able to stand alone, too.
“A big part of realizing that involved bringing in collaborators to amend the production on three of the songs,” Honeyfitz says by email. “Lyrically, especially on a project this short, the throughlines emerge without ever having to think too much about it. These are all songs about navigating new routines in a new city, and how that has changed the way I look back at Western Mass.”
Honeyfitz and Gabe Gill, his collaborator in the duo Deadmall, worked on the videos piecemeal over the course of several months, drawing on the figure-it-out aesthetic that Honeyfitz began honing when he got a camcorder at age 12. They used that same camcorder to film “Wellfleet” and some of “Screen Doors,” while former roommates in Hadley shot parts of “Dissolve.”
The resulting EP-and-videos project is short, but powerful. The songs and their accompanying clips have a lonesome, handmade feel, accentuated by Honeyfitz’s searching, AutoTuned vocals and lacerating lyrics, and footage of him walking down deserted streets in Brooklyn or standing alone in a driveway in Hadley. “Dissolve” features contributions from Boston electronic musician Dylan Soulard, but he’s calling in via FaceTime, which emphasizes the sense of isolation in a changing world.
“Screen Doors” and “5 +10 Love Letter” are sort of the A-side/B-side follow-ups to his 2019 LP “I Don’t Need Tennis Lessons, I Need a Therapist” while Honeyfitz works on his next full-length. Though each EP was planned, the roll-out for “Screen Doors” was improvisational.
“The casual, one-at-a-time nature of the release wasn't something I had planned on, but with our world shifting every day I felt like it was appropriate,” he says.