I’m not a rock star but I play one on the Internet. For about 10 years I was an amateur bassist/lyricist in bands you’ve never heard of—most notably Honey White—and I broke into design based on the posters, album covers, and websites I created for those bands. While at UCSB in the late ’90s, I also wrote about music for the Daily Nexus and Santa Barbara Independent. I still make music these days under my own name, including two EPs and a soundtrack for my self-published weird pulp novel. In 2021, I condensed my entire 25-year musical history into a 12-episode podcast.

Keir’s  low-key, ambient echo-bass music comes in two forms: instrumentally as Low Tide in 1999 and 2008 (with help from various Mojo Wire and Honey White bandmates) as well as by himself on solo EPs in 2015, 2020, and 2023.

Honey White makes music of intense power and sweet release. We used to be from Santa Barbara, California, but now we’re from everywhere. The last time you saw us, we were most likely melting your eardrums with a hazy, spacious void of sonic effects and instrumental textures.

Our music is not the soundtrack to the rest of your life. It’s the background noise for the time right before you have any idea what the rest of your life will bring. Don’t go underwater, or into space, or even into the recesses of your own mind without a Honey White soundtrack.

Honey White began in Santa Barbara during the fearful year of 2002, when the brothers (and Mojo Wire bandmates) Bryn and Keir DuBois recruited guitarist Brian Wolff and drummer Bill Fedderson to help them mash together rock, roots, punk, and reggae into a unique mix of expansively epic noise.

Their debut demo My Band Rocks was praised by the Santa Barbara Independent as “some of the best music to come out of Isla Vista,” and then after unloading three self-produced live albums in as many years, Honey White unleashed a new studio album of crushing power and sweet release titled How Far is the Fall.

The group has been based in the Santa Barbara area, but they have also made live appearances around California in support of their album, recorded in San Francisco with Jonathan Mayer. A fourth live disc—Deluge and Drought—was released in 2007.

Honey White reunited briefly in late 2010, resulting in the one-off Corridan demo, but went into semi-permanent hibernation the following year. Bill departed for Colorado, Brian formed the Neuro Farm in Washington D.C., and the brothers DuBois formed Radblaster in Orange County.

The Mojo Wire did its indie-garage-rock thing in Orange County and Isla Vista from 1996-2001. before a variety of amicable reasons split up the members of this garage-rock combo, capping off a stretch of four self-recorded, self-released albums, twenty-three slapdash, scattershot gigs, and a whole lotta loud, messy fun.

They began when guitarists Adam Hill and Bryn DuBois formed a blues band in Dana Point, CA during May 1996, and recruited Keir DuBois (bass) and Kevin Nerison (drums) as rhythm section. Soon named in honor of Hunter Thompson’s annoying fax device, the band moved to Santa Barbara, CA and switched drummers, adding Brandon Klopp for about a year before shifting the lineup again to add Joe Zulli on guitar and moving Bryn to drums.

The group’s sound morphed along with its membership, from blues to surf to psychedelic to rootsy folk/country to garage rock, but always present was a bent, bizarro sensibility infecting anything they did. The Mojo Wire entered an extended hiatus in 2002 when the brothers DuBois went on to form Honey White, but the original 1996 lineup reconvened as Radblaster in 2010 for a fun series of rehearsals and self-produced EP.

This site is up for history/posterity reasons, and because people can be a bit weird about their first band. Especially when their first band was three different bands. You may have seen other Mojo Wires running around the internet over the years, but it’s safe to say that this Mojo Wire was the first, and probably worst, of them all—and we’re not sorry. We probably should be, based on the evidence, though. Check it out: