Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears: Scandalous

By Jeannette Madden
Staff Writer

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears are the special guests of Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings Wednesday, May 18 at the historic Fargo Theatre and boy oh boy, is that going to be a show Fargo will be talking about for years to come. Currently on tour in support of their newly released second album, Scandalous, Lewis and his band know how to put on a show.

HPR:  I see that your shows are selling out and fans have really high expectations of you, which you’re exceeding. Does that make you feel like you’re doing things right? How does that make you feel?

JL:  It’s awesome. It’s good to see that our career’s going the right path. We haven’t got a whole bunch of press on this run but we’re still selling out almost every show. It’s pretty cool to have a word of mouth fan base. It’s great and we just want to keep growing as a band and it’s cool to get to travel and play music for money, you know? It’s pretty bad ass, over all.

HPR:  I already knew of you but I think this is a huge opportunity for Fargo and I’m really excited that you’re going there. This is almost like culture.

JL:  Yeah, I’ve never been anywhere near there [laughs]. I have no idea what to expect in Fargo.

HPR:  Where’s your favorite place to play so far?

JL:  Either Spain or Columbus, Ohio.

HPR:  Why each of those?

JL:  In Columbus when we played people were actually mosh pitting, which is really cool. I wish they had like mosh pits every night. In Spain it’s really rowdy and it’s pretty. We played on the beach there and people were pretty nice.

HPR:  What original members are still in the band and how did you and Zack [Ernst – guitar] hook up?

JL:  I met Zach when he hooked me up with Little Richard at the gig he was working on. After that, I didn’t have a band anymore so he offered to put a band together and we had a different horn section back then and we had a keyboard player, he was on the first record, he’s gone. That’s pretty much how it all came together, you know?

HPR:  How do you write your songs? Who contributes, what do you guys do?

JL:  It’s all different. Some of them I’ve written and some of them somebody will come up with a riff, like Zach. Someone will come up with something and we’ll get together and practice and try out a bunch of new stuff, taking whatever works. As far as writing lyrics, I’ll take from stories that I read a lot of times. Like [The Ballad Of] Jimmy Tanks was about a story I read in the paper about this old man that got in a gunfight with the repo guy. [You Been] Lyin’ was something I wrote after I read a book, stuff like that.

HPR:  How was it working with Jim Eno [producer of Scandalous and drummer for the band Spoon]? What did he bring to the table?

JL:  He’s great. We’ve known him for a little while and we went on tour with Spoon our first tour, which is how we got to know him. It helps to work with somebody you can have a rapport with already and he’s got a lot of ideas. Great studio, great guy, someone you get to hang out with. It isn’t so much like going to work. We really lucked out with getting a guy like Jim.

Watch Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybear’s video Sugarfoot here:
http://qr.net/b069 or scan the QR code.

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If You Go:
What/Who: Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears
When: Wednesday, May 18th at 6:30 p.m.
Where: The Fargo Theatre

Ticket Price: $25 - $35 online at: http://bit.ly/iJFVwd

Links:         
Website: http://tiny.cc/BJLWeb
Facebook: http://tiny.cc/BJLFB
Twitter: @blackjoelewis