Local Non-Profit Beneficiary: Building Hope Summit County

Honey Island Swamp Band 

The Honey Island Swamp Band are a thrilling, eclectic band that defies genre conventions, renders song structures elastic, and wholeheartedly stresses that the song reigns supreme. Since they formed in 2005 in San Francisco after their displacement from New Orleans via Katrina — and subsequently relocated back home — the band has evolved to embody contemporary roots music. If you’re wondering where the numerous streams of American sounds coalesce and commingle in the modern scene, look no further. And the fivesome — bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Wilkinson, guitarist and vocalist Lee Yankee, bassist Sam Price, keyboardist Chris Spies, and drummer and vocalist Garland Pau— is about to release their most satisfying, consolidative album to date: Custom Deluxe, out June 23 on Color Red Music. Songs like the kinetic “High River Rag,” authoritative “Wildfire” and blues-rocking “Sugar For Sugar” display these musical omnivores at a new zenith. “We’re definitely melody-driven, vocal-driven, lyric-driven,” Wilkinson explains of the Honey Island Swamp Band’s modus operandi at this juncture, with Custom Deluxe. “We like something that’s new, yet sounds like it could have been a hit that you didn’t know about.” The Honey Island Swamp Band titled Custom Deluxe after an old truck Wilkinson used to own. (“We are very much an old-school truck type of band,” he says.) The logo on the album cover is a modified version of the real-life insignia on the truck; after Wilkinson described his vision to designer Chris Ball, he whipped it up immediately. “I loved it instantly,” Wilkinson recalls. “We didn’t even do any revisions.”