Peggy Honeywell

Honey for Dinner (Galaxia)
by Jamie Kiffel

Like nerdy, black-rimmed plastic glasses on the face of a young film studies major, Peggy Honeywell makes it hip to be square. From her lovestruck warble to the CD’s sepia photo of Honeywell on a farm, wearing a gingham lace and ruffled dress, it’s hard to say whether she’s an alt.rocker, intentionally being absurdly countrified, or truly a sweet-voiced country singer wannabe. Whatever her motivation, this is different enough from the usual slosh of guitar girls and boys to make it a funky addition to any good hipster’s CD collection.

Notably, a punk, vegan friend of mine has stuck to her fridge – beside magnetic poetry and drunken shots of her roommates – a glamour shot of a thickly made up, satin-dressed woman with a come-hither gaze and shockingly high hair. “Where’d you get this?” I asked, guessing Urban Outfitters.

“It’s my sister,” she smiled.

Serious or not, Honeywell must have an offbeat mind to create the original art that graces the album cover: a primitive style gouache brain trip featuring black bears under a honeycomb sky, eating honey blobs beside a pair of bees playing instruments, and being watched by a green, naked demon asparagus creature with webbed feet.

Perhaps that demon included the final track, a cover of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.” This sounds like a shut-in Elvis fanatic trying breathlessly to perform her favorite song, as her countrified baby voice stumbles to keep up with the one guitar chord she ever learned. I get the feeling that she performed this song 47 previous times before getting through it once without stopping. Even so, this is the only truly bad track, and it would surely add good texture to novelty college radio shows.

Fine music? Absolutely not. But, like any great non-sequitur, it charms me to smile. And isn’t the unexpected what makes life great?
(PO Box 380 Santa Cruz, CA 95061)