Husbands OKC

By EJ Jolly

Husbands is the buzzchild of Wil Norton and Danny Davis, two Oklahoma City natives proving that bedroom pop is most definitely alive and well. At their full-time jobs by weekday, recording music in their bedrooms and playing gigs by the weekend, Husbands has been honing their style since 2013. Their album Golden Year is chock-full of nostalgic summertime jams, and their Bandcamp has countless more to choose from – ranging from a love letter to one of OKC’s richest neighborhoods to an IKEA commercial in disguise.

Contributing writer EJ Jolly got a chance to see what they were up to in 2018, insight into their writing process, and their thoughts on Bandcamp over services like Spotify.

EJ: First, tell me what each of you guys does when it comes to writing music.

Wil: Start us off, Danny.

Danny: Okay, so like writing songs… It’s kind of uber-democratic, the way we do it. We come up with ideas, we use Dropbox pretty heavily. We have the same recording software and when we have an idea, we just kind of do crappy little scratch tracks that we upload on the Internet. And a lot of times we’re just doing gibberish over chord progressions.

Wil: We’re just excited to hear what each other writes, and we want to – whenever we hear something new that’s exciting to us, we just want to get on it and start adding to it immediately.

EJ: What’s the origin story? How did you all end up meeting?

Wil: Even before we became friends, we were both recording and publishing music. Danny had Daniel The Brave, which was kind of a folk – folk pop project, and I was recording with The Non. So we both kind of had a mutual respect there to begin with, but we went to college together and became friends. We played Super Smash Brothers, way late late into the night.

We realized pretty quickly that it was pretty easy to work together, and it was pretty natural. It’s kind of weird to think that out first big collaborative effort together was teaching 40 college students how to dance along to ABBA songs. But side note: we won that competition. I’m just saying!

EJ: You guys just put out “No One’s Dreaming” and “Amazon,” which were collaborations with OBNEAC Records. Can you talk a bit about recording for that?

Danny: There’s a lot of songs we’re working with right now, but those two… were outside the realm of those, and we liked them at the same time, so we didn’t want them to go by the wayside. “No One’s Dreaming” – Wil had that one demoed a long time ago. We fleshed that one out when we were thinking of ones we wanted to get done, and that wouldn’t mesh with the other ones.

Wil: I thought they were kind of two songs that were like- that we loved that were kind of a little different from the clumps of songs that we have been working.

EJ: Anything else you’re excited to put out?

Wil: Yeah! We have a bunch of stuff that we’re finishing right now, and I think we’re gonna have an album out- what did we say, Danny? July?

Danny: Yeah, some time in those 4 summer months. July would be a nice time, that’s kind of where our heads are at.

EJ: Are you guys going to try to follow the standard single-single-album release format?

Danny: Man… Releasing single-single-album is the smart way to do it. We don’t always do things that way. It just depends if we can keep organized. We’ll probably put out one or two, I think that’s realistic. We just gotta finish them first.

EJ: I’ve noticed you guys release more music on Bandcamp versus other streaming sites. Why the preference? I realize it’s kind of a can of worms…

Danny: No, that’s a good question. If it’s on Spotify, it’s something we want the world to- I mean, we’re fully on board with everyone hearing. Bandcamp seems more like a playground. I don’t know, what do you think, Wil?

Wil: Well, that’s part of it. The other part of it – the really boring reason – it costs us like $100 to put something on Spotify. Bandcamp you can just throw it up for free, and there’s not a lot of commitment on our part. And usually, what we think about, we don’t really want to throw up a bunch of singles on our Spotify. We’d rather put out an album.

Catch them with The Twiggs and NET on March 16th at the Tower Theatre in Oklahoma City, OK. They will also be at the Norman Music Festival from April 26th to the 28th.