Honus Honus’ music has been classified as a lot of things over the course of Man Man’s nearly two decades of existence, from gypsy punk and dark cabaret in their infancy to alternative dance and surf rock upon the release of their last record, 2013’s On Oni Pond. The long awaited follow-up to that album finally arrives today via Honus’ new home of Sub Pop Records—and as expected, it’ll take some creative thinking to land on genre classifications for it.
As surprising, experimental, and piano-, horn-, and marimba-heavy as ever, the seventeen-track sixth LP from Man Man, Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, is a dense jungle of psychedelic thoughts, relying on unexpected outside sources—including resurrected “Friday” singer Rebecca Black—for the record’s unique sound. Everything from the Hindenburg disaster to Tinder inspired the writing of this thing, including Honus’ experience watching a friend wrestle a shit-talking globe at a house party in the aughts—and it all somehow comes through very clearly.
In being the type of record that may require a road map, Honus (born Ryan Kattner) was generous enough to offer us a guide—read along to what he has to say about each track as you stream the record below. You can purchase the album now via the Sub Pop store here, though a digital download through Bandcamp today will guarantee Honus sees 100 percent of the proceeds.
1. “Dreamers”
I wanted to open the album with something beautiful, sweet, and wistful. Jimmy Goldsmith “Chinatown” vibe. This one felt like a fitting, classic Hollywood way of setting up the narrative. Gauzy lens, dreaminess, hope, harps.
2. “Cloud Nein”
As a kid, my family moved every three years and it instilled a permanent sense of impermanence—that nothing really lasts. During my unexpected Man Man sabbatical, this reality hit me very hard. It was something that I had to wrestle, wrangle, and come to terms with eventually. Lyrically, the song references a lot of seemingly disparate sources: Br’er Rabbit, John Travolta’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, the Hindenburg disaster. And it’s a pop song!
The opening cacophony, which reminds me of pterodactyl’s screeching, or a Bernard Hermann stabbing sequence, is the direct result of what happened when I asked my piano tuner (Mark the Key Man) what his favorite sound in the world was. “I was restringing an upright piano. It was lying on its back. I was using a two-pound sledgehammer to drive in the tuning pins. I set down the hammer on the strings and when I let go it started wobbling back and forth. Sounded cool so I recorded it.” I love the contrast of this intro and how the album is set up with “Dreamers.” Left turns.
3. “On the Mend”
Sometimes a sound inspires an idea that then spins out into a song—and for me that’s a rare occurrence, like seeing a shooting star that’s not just space trash burning up on reentry. I’d had a cheesy pizzicato string patch installed on my keyboard for the longest time that I always wanted to use. It sounded more like popcorn popping than a soloist plucking, and when I dropped that sound an octave lower than it should be, it had a nice boomy ’80s quality to it. In my brain, it felt almost like an Enya/Peter Gabriel synth.
I wanted the arrangement off the top to feel like a band warming up, players walking to their places, picking up their instruments. Lyrically, I was coming out of a long relationship, so I’m sure that partially inspired the words, although it’s not specifically about that relationship aside from the frustration of breakups and smartphones in the new millennia. We’ve all been there. Maybe this song helps.
4. “Lonely Beuys”
It tends to take me forever to find a way into a new song, what it’s about, what it means to me, etc. I’ve never had much luck writing music first, or lyrics first. They tend to happen at the exact same time, which is a pretty laborious way of composing. This song is inspired by Tinder, Fluxus, artist Joseph Beuys’ 1974 “I Like America and America Likes Me” performance piece where he spent three days living in a warehouse with a wild coyote, Bermuda Triangle theories, and Alexandro Jodorowsky’s principles of using psychomagic shamanic psychotherapy to heal past life traumas.
This song was born out of a friend telling me I should write a song with “billboards” in the lyrics. Usually, when people suggest I write a song about something, 99.99 percent of the time I don’t. I love the Jesus Christ Superstar meets “Breaking News!” segment in the middle of the tune and how it launches into a duel guitar solo. It’s important to keep listeners guessing.
5. “Future Peg”
Came up with the little keyboard hook, looped it for a long time, and eventually the lyrics poured out like maple syrup. I consciously wanted to keep the words visual, visceral, and playful, and the drums to sound trashy, in your face, like you’re sitting in the middle of a band that’s just going for it. I might have been going through a meltdown at the time. We’re all more than just a peg on the wall, a notch in the belt. Don’t forget it or you’ll lose yourself forever.
6. “Goat”
I knew someone who had been bitten by a goat and they were convinced they’d contracted salmonella. Wanted to give the actor Sal Mineo, who was stabbed to death in a carport outside his West Hollywood apartment in 1976, a little shoutout too. Also, where my locum tenens at? Not enough songs written about locum tenens. You can’t contract salmonella from a goat bite, by the way, but in this song…it’ll kill you.
7. “Inner Iggy”
Inspired by a variety of things: a crazy bachelor party I’d heard about where a head was discovered in an ice chest during a hike in the mountains, an apartment that had a window overlooking a brick wall, the story of Pinocchio and Pleasure Island, Little Orphan Annie, Freudian concepts of dopplegängers, etc. How does one deal with life’s little tragedies? Summon your inner Iggy Pop.
8. “Hunters”
You can’t fix other people, but it doesn’t stop people from trying. Did you know that when a male cat climaxes he aggressively bites the nape of the female’s neck? It’s violent, it’s terrible, don’t search for it on the web. I’m particularly proud of the line, “I wish I was crueler, I’d slash the throat of my god.“ That is some heavy stuff. My guitar player Brett’s solo at the end of the song is probably one of my favs on the album.
9. “Oyster Point”
I found an old cassette tape recording of eight-year-old me doing wretched renditions of Bruce Springteen’s “Born in the USA” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You” to my newly born brother. Was I calming him or torturing? Verdict is still out. The little vocal melody that opens this song is also eight-year-old Ryan Kattner. The “field recording” at the end is what happens when you try and buy a bass clarinet from a sketchy Craigslist post. You end up in the middle of nowhere, playing a broken bass clarinet to the delight of a broken bass clarinet owner who has no idea that what he owns is completely unsalvageable. Priceless!
10. “The Prettiest Song in the World”
In 2017 I was hired to write songs for two different musicals, one a staged play, the other a feature film. Neither came to fruition but I ended up with a handful of songs for defunct musicals that I couldn’t use. Prior to this experience, I’d never had a desire to write musicals and knew little about the form, but I found it starting to creep into some of my songwriting approach. I think this tune is where the bleed over happened the most. I’m an insomniac and I don’t have the greatest thoughts at 4 a.m. when I open my eyes, wide awake.
I remember being on tour in Ohio once and laying in my motel room after a gig and watching an hour-long infomercial about “the benefits of walking” and being simultaneously captivated and depressed that everything had come to the point where we have to “sell” the act of walking to people. “Walking around the mall is fun! Walking around a lake is great exercise!” It really fit into the “shop until you drop” mentality of it all. I was also on kind of an ELO kick at the time, so that popped in for a cameo before I started to mix it up with “guy at the country fair who’s had too much to drink and is whooping it up” vibes.
I like to picture the chair fighting scene from Gummo for that musical bridge, or when I was at a house party in the mid-2000s in Philly and my friend JP beat the hell out of a globe that was “talking shit.” Nothing more stirring than seeing a man in his twenties beating the hell out of a “globe talking shit.” The ending verse is pretty true to life. I wanted to write someone I was hanging out with at the time the prettiest song in the world, but there were wildfires raging in the mountains behind Burbank. At night, when I was driving down the 5, it looked like the fires of Mordor spewing lava down the hillside. Gorgeously destructive.
11. “Animal Attraction”
Sometimes you sort of let yourself fall for the wrong person even though you know from the get-go it doesn’t have any real legs—but you still do it anyway because “why not? Maybe this time I’m wrong?” and it still pans out horribly and you find yourself looking in the mirror going, “Told you so, dummy!” but while it’s all still happening and all these feelings are new and familiar and fluttering around, you go and write one of the best songs you’ve ever written and instantly regret that it was inspired by someone you didn’t really care about. Yeah. This is one of those songs.
12. “Sheela”
The entire time I was watching the Wild Wild Country documentary about the cult that set up shop in rural Oregon in the ’80s, I was riveted, terrified, and repulsed by Ma Anand Sheela and her endless drive for control and power. She was such a force of nature. Two weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Was this love? I wrote her this song to try and get her out of my system, shake her hold on me. Did it work? Yes. Yes. Look at my eyes. Yes. It took a lot of restraint to not use her most popular catchphrase in this song but I did it! I love you, Sheela.
13. “Unsweet Meat”
As has been well-documented, I spent my formative young adulthood in Philadelphia and them waters are real weird. I saw Sun Ra Arkestra play a lot. The ending here is an homage to the sing-along vibes they pioneered and branded forever onto my heart. Space is the place.
14. “Swan”
Ken Burns. Get at me. Use this song. For your documentary about stuff that happened to people years ago. Subject matter does not matter. Feelings matter.
15. “Powder My Wig”
In another world, this would be our single. This is American Roots music. To hell with what people say otherwise. This is my “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Someday y’all will understand.
16. “If Only”
A song inspired by a dream. Sort of. I had a dream one night in which a Jackie Wilson/Al Gardner/Al Green type soul singer was crooning “If Only” in the most heartbreaking but catchiest of melodies and the song got more and more upbeat as the singer dug in deeper. I woke up and remembered the dream and rushed over to my writing space and this song poured right out of me, and even though it ended up having the exact opposite sound of what I was hearing in my head melody-wise, it still embodied the spirit of the idea.
I love how intimate it became, how you can hear the creaking of the upright bass, you can hear breaths being taken by Kevin, our bass clarinet player, between woodwind rests. I’d never put a duet on an album before, but I felt like the narrative of this song would be better served with two voices. I’ve always admired Dre Babinski’s (Steady Holiday) voice, the texture and how she masters the fragility, and I had a feeling the contrast between our tones would be a perfect, melancholy fit. This song might be one of the most beautiful things I’ve written—and rarely does something I’ve written still have an effect on me every time I hear it. Proud of this lil’ tune.
17. “Valley of the In-Betweens”
A fitting bookend. Somber, reflective, what’s next?
