Bewildering their own non-musical parents, Adam and Noah Levy showed undeniable enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll growing up in St. Paul. By poring over records by artists like the Beatles, Adam learned the essence of singing and composition. Noah learned to annoy his next-door neighbor by practicing drums for hours on end.

Today, the Levy brothers' tremendous impact of 30-plus years of work in local music continues. Adam plays and sings in acclaimed local acts Turn Turn Turn, Sunshine Committee, and Shabby Road Orchestra; and Noah works (or has worked) with nationally renowned acts including Brian Setzer, Soul Asylum, Peter Frampton, BoDeans, and Five For Fighting. 

Adam and Noah have contributed to countless other projects over the years, but the band that made it possible is the Honeydogs. In 1996, this songwriter-focused, guitar-forward rock band released Everything I Bet You. It was a record that went on to give meaning and sustenance to a community of devout listeners here in the Twin Cities and beyond. It also kickstarted the brothers’ professional careers in music. 

The Honeydogs have gone on to release a total of 11 albums since their inception in 1994. The lineup has also shifted and grown over the years. This Friday, the original four-piece, including guitarist Tommy Borscheid and bassist Trent Norton, will return to headline First Avenue’s Mainroom celebrating the vinyl release and remaster of that iconic record.

Ahead of the show, the kind-hearted Levy brothers spoke about the release, the fruits of hard work, their love of music, family dynamics, the ever-changing music scene, and much more.

Transcript edited for length and clarity

Diane: Talk to me about how this all started.

Adam Levy: Somebody reached out to me about re-releasing this record. And anytime anybody says, "I want to release your record on vinyl, "I'm like, "Woo!" I love having everything, including old stuff, rereleased on vinyl. And so we announced that and then I got a message from Tommy, the early guitar player. He's like, “We should do a show.” And I was like, “Man, you took the words out of my mouth. That's a great idea. Let's do it.” 

So we just got everybody in the loop. And everybody was kind of instantly into doing it. It's 30 years ago that we were making music together. It's so weird. It feels so close in so many ways. But we've all lived multiple lives since then. And it just felt like a good thing to kind of put it back together and recreate or approximate what felt like magic when we were doing it. You know, it was sort of — we worked really hard on it, but when it came together, I think I was kind of baffled, like, "Wow, I did something that really moves people." And I think people love that lineup from the band. Even though the band's kind of evolved at various stages, there was something about the excitement of our youth and naivete and non-jadedness doing it.

Noah Levy: Well, I think it's also other people. My friends are coming out of the woodwork right now like, “I'm coming to town that weekend!”

Diane: That's amazing. It's bringing people together. 

Noah: I think it does. Part of it is the music. I think another part is like, I want to remember what it was like in 1996 when we all hung out together. We'd go to shows or we do all these things. And it's kind of turning into something much bigger than us.

Adam: Right. It's cool to think of the music. You don't think of your own music as marking people's lives, you know, like in terms of how they envision themselves in the world. Because I can think of records that really remind me of different points in my life, and I'd never thought I was going to create music that would do that for someone else. So that's kind of cool.

[Clip of “Glee” plays in background]

Diane: Do you think that your parents would see you both become these dedicated musicians that you had become?

Noah: They were mystified by it. They weren't musical at all.

Adam: Mom and Dad had a great record collection, even though it wasn't gigantic — Charlie Parker records and Beatles and all that stuff. And they listened to music. The things they listened to, I think kind of made their way into what we do one way or another. But my dad was not a musician. Mom was not really a musician either. And, Noah's right, they were mystified and sort of, I think, enamored of the fact that we really had the performance bug.

Diane: Interesting.

Noah: Yeah, but I mean, I couldn't play drums in the house when my mom was home. When I got home from school to when my mom got home, I could play the drums. 

Adam: Yeah, and then Mr. Prezak would come over and yell at you with his shirt off in the yard.

Noah: Yeah, "Rar! Rar! Ra!"

Diane: (Laughs) The neighbor! 

[Clip of “Moth” plays]

I would love to hear more about the both of y'all’s relationship as brothers who've been together doing it. What's it like being family together as musicians, creative people? And how do you balance this dynamic between the two of you as having different roles?

Adam: I think we're really different in a lot of ways, but there's something kind of telepathic about playing with Noah. You know, even if we haven't done it for a long time, there's a groove connection. And part of it has to do with the fact that we listened to same music growing up and spent so much time working really closely where we really shaped each other's aesthetics and skills.  

Noah: Our taste is very, very similar.

Adam: Yeah, even though we've listened to lots of different music, I think the things we sort of gravitate towards that feel real and funky and cool are probably very similar most of the time.

[Clip of “Kandiyohi” plays]

So when we were in a band together, we were not just about the joy of creating music, it was about soaking up music every day, and showing each other what we're listening to constantly. Absorbing new influences and ideas and things that just kind of rocked our world on the road, that's what we did. We listened to music.

Noah: But the other side, as all brothers bands are, any fight will come to the surface right away. Whereas with other people — and sometimes that can be painful. But we could really get to the meat of the argument pretty quickly. And it was not fun at times. But I'd say we get along a lot better now that we're not touring together.

Adam: Yeah, I think we kind of know what buttons (to) push ...

Noah: We played together all these years, by the way. I left the band in, like —

Adam: 2003. 

Noah: Yeah, like the year my son was born. And we played together in Hookers & Blow for many years. But we were just doing covers. And there was always something — we're always playing music together. But it wasn't —

Adam: We weren't hooked to the side of each other financially.

Noah: Financially, but also my being – I became a side person after that. And I put my being into playing. But my identity was the Honeydogs. And since then, I haven't had that. I've been this kind of free-floating musician. And there was great joy in it. But there was also great pain when things didn't go well. My whole being was tied to it. So yeah, the highs were high and the lows were really low.

Diane: Being a musician isn't necessarily all as glamorous as it might seem.

Adam: It can be brutal. The sort of cycles of doing something that people pay attention to and trying to create something that is compelling and, like Noah said, figuring out how to get bodies to a show like this. It's a lot of frickin' work to keep it up.

Diane: Yeah, well, that is so true ... To turn out a quality product such as a full-length album, such as a great live show, great live performance that people want to come back to, it takes so much practice, takes so much writing, it takes so much coordination with other band members, and just emotional work. Not only emotional work, but creative work and creative time.

How do you both set yourself up to succeed in that way? Because, obviously, yes, there's the ebbs and flows and ups and downs. But what do you think has been kind of a key to really maintain being able to set yourself up to practice and write. 

Adam: I mean, the reason I keep doing this is because I love writing music; and it probably sounds cliché, but I haven't written my best song yet. And so I feel like that drives me to want to continue to create something that I would want to listen to. And that is like, in spite of all of those business considerations, that's the thing that drives me on to keep making music and to keep kind of finding different collaborative things. And you just have to pay attention to what other people are doing constantly. And that can be ego-bruising to like — look how many people love this thing that this person is making, and they're never gonna like what I'm doing. But you have to kind of learn from how other people do it to be able to figure out something that makes sense for you in terms of projecting yourself out there and kind of sustaining a career. And sometimes that means you got to do other kinds of work to kind of put steak on the table in order to make your art. And I've just sort of settled myself into that.

Noah: It's weird. I went back and listened to this record. I mean, I have to relearn these songs, right? A lot of these songs you haven't played in a long time too. And I'm thinking a lot about where we were during that time. And that year, we played like 220 shows. We got in the van, we're booking ourselves. Yeah, maybe just on the cusp —

Adam: We had a map with pushpins. And we would just go like, we should go here, we should go here.

Diane: You were hustling.

Adam: Yeah, there was no internet at that point.

Noah: Adam and I were making phone calls and booking. I think we may have had a booking agent on that record. But we went and went and went and we were broke. We were all sharing a hotel. But, man, the record. There are certain points on that record, where I don't know that I've ever achieved that. There's a couple moments on there where I was just blown away, and really kind of happily surprised. Couple where I'm like, "Ooh, we kind of missed this or that." Or maybe we mixed something weird or whatever.

Adam: We made the record we wanted to make at that point in time. I think it really felt like we — I always say … it was a snapshot of the band that was working really hard. There was a sort of parity in terms of everybody's contribution. When I'm listening to people's parts. It was like, these are all the ideas of the people that were making this music. It wasn't like me — I think over time, I've probably become more controlling over the whole process. And I kind of like that just because I work really quickly. But at that point, that was what made the band so special was the unique contribution of all the constituent parts to it.

Diane: I want to jump ahead and talk about how you're thinking back to 30 years ago, and you're playing these songs and that you're bringing people together. And then y'all have offspring in the music scene right now that are probably doing the same thing. And they'll be doing music 30 years from now. And I think that's so exciting. 

I also want to acknowledge that I know you (Adam) lost a son to suicide 2012. I want to address that because I think a lot of us who are artists in the music scene know what the struggle is like with mental illness. I struggle with it. I've been in therapy for like 15 years, and I take medication for it. It's very common, I feel like, amongst artists, and I think it's great to talk about it. And I appreciate what you've done and how you've been open about that to help address the stigma of it. And I just want to — before I get into hearing you two talk about your children who are doing amazing things in the scene. Adam, Ava is doing incredible things. I love her music that I've played on my show. Noah, your son Isaac is a wizard at bass and guitar and backs up a lot of amazing musicians in town (and Nationally). 

But, Adam, tell me about what this growth of coming out of this darkness has been like for you?

Adam: It's been a long and difficult 10 years. It's hard to believe that it's actually been 10 years, or a little more than that at this point. You know, you never get over it. It's always super painful. There are moments of my day, every day that I think about Daniel, and there's no amount of therapy that can balm the pain, and loss and that massive kind of gaping sense of absence of Daniel in our lives. But I think we've all, in the family, have learned a lot about how tough we are. Losing a child to me is the worst thing imaginable. And God willing, that would never happen again. I feel like I've been through one of the hardest things and so that gives me some strength in life. Anytime there's something that I feel is challenging. It's just like, Well, dude, you lost a child. What could be worse than that? So yeah, it's strengthened us in a lot of ways. I think my daughters have grown a lot as a result of it. Of course, it weighs heavily on them and always will. But I think their understanding of their own mental health and their empathy for other people suffering —

Noah: They're remarkable that way. 

Diane: Absolutely.

Adam: Yeah. You know, it's hard to say, "What are the good things that come out of a death?" And there really isn't anything except the fact that we're still here. You know, we love each other more than ever.

Diane: Beautifully stated. Yeah, talk to me about — because it's so exciting because I'm talking with two veterans in the scene. And then there is this younger group of musicians that are really doing amazing things, and your children are in the scene and doing amazing things. What are you seeing? What are you viewing? What are you observing from your kids in the music scene?

Noah: Oh man, there's just so much I don't know. I'm so removed from it. It's almost like I get a debriefing every day from my son and my nieces too. And it's a whole lifetime below me. But we're doing the same things. It's just kind of around the margins, things are different, if that makes sense. But I have no idea what it's like to start out and do a new band night in the Entry right now. You know, that was over 30 years ago for me. And I don't know what it's like to come up among new artists just doing it for the first time. We have all these people we came up with over the years. And it feels like we all went to war together.

What do you get from your kids? Do they talk about that stuff with you?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, I would say the one of the biggest dimensions is the consciousness of being a white artist in the world, and all that that entails. All of the responsibilities and sort of privileges that I never thought about as a musician. It's like, "Oh, I love African American music." When I was in college, I wrote about it. And I sort of felt like, if I cared about something enough and paid homage to it, I was doing the right thing. But I've realized through my daughters, there's just so much more heavy lifting required. I'm also surrounded by teenage kids every day and listening to the music that they're listening to.

Diane: You’re a teacher.

Adam: I'm a teacher in high school, and I'm constantly reminded of how old I am by them. And I'm a baby boomer. But there are also similarities. I think starting out a band and finding a creative community is just something that will never die with the advent of AI and everything. People are always searching for human connections. And people freaked out about player pianos. And they freaked out about CDs and digital recordings. And even if there's a disruption, we always figure out some way to incorporate these huge disruptions into making art.

I can remember when synthesizers were happening. People were like, "Oh, the guitar is dead. People aren't gonna play guitars anymore." Well, I listened to all of this debate and watch students handing in papers that I can tell are cobbled together from some AI-generated chat thing. And the kids have access to so much — the celestial jukebox of just being able to hear music from all time, and all contemporary music at one moment to me would've boggled my mind as a young musician. I think that is kind of a mind — I can't say the word but you know what I'm gonna say.

Noah: Well, yeah, the thing that I also get is this town, the talent pool is bottomless here. People come out of the woodwork all the time. I'm like, "Where did you come from? You're a fully formed artist, or you're a fully formed player." Every week, it's like, "Who are you? Who is this person?" Where did they — I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is about this place. 

Adam: But it's pretty magical. 

Noah: It's unbelievable. 

Adam: Compared to so many other parts of the country or the world like the amount of music. Noah and I had this conversation, like I said, I felt like there's more bands and artists coming around. And Noah says, "I think there were more in the ‘90s." And maybe you were just saying like bands, specifically, not artists. 

Noah: You would have more of a sense of that. You do The Local Show every week. 

Adam: I feel like there's just way more music now.

Diane: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of my job, of course, is to learn from others, and especially y'all. But yeah, I'm observing a lot and it's exciting. I feel like I have a bottomless wealth of excitement to pull from as the host of The Local Show, because there's so much good music happening in all genres, which is really cool. Especially, I know y'all enjoy different types of music. I do too. And that's why I get to do what I do, and it's exciting. And to be able to share that with other people is another just incredible gift. So it's great to have a great radio station to like The Current. 

[Clip of “Over You” plays in background]

What can you tell us about the show you have planned ... How are you envisioning it?

Adam: Well, first off, we've got a couple of great openers for the show, Humbird and Jake La Botz. Noah's played with Jake.

He lives in Winona, right?

Noah: He's back here now, or he moved here. And he's great. I play with him. But I think he's probably gonna be playing solo that night. 

Adam: I can't believe that dude hasn't popped yet. It's crazy. 

Noah: He will. He's amazing. But when when you ask about the show, though, I think one thing that we really — we thought about all these big ideas —

Adam: Dancers and –

Noah: Yeah, and people coming down from the ceiling and flashbangs. But Tommy, the guitar player, said, "You know, I really, I think the four of us being on stage should be the biggest part of it." I think it'd be very easy to overshadow the four of our interactions. We're gonna have — our friend John Fields is gonna play piano, Ken Chastain is gonna play some percussion, your daughter (Ava) is gonna be doing a little singing. But I think it's really important that the four of us get up there and look each other in the eye and like, "Let's do this," you know? And kind of be present and enjoy it and be together, the four of us. 

Adam: Yeah, I mean, a lot of my conceptualizing this show is like, I've changed as a player. And I think I have higher demands on myself as far as how I play my instrument. How I sing. And I've learned a lot since then. And I just feel like I want to be able to do this music and believe it as I'm doing it – really make it meaningful and make it feel like I'm making this now and I'm not just recreating the way that I played music 30 years ago.  

Diane: I want to go into your side projects real quick, because in particular Turn Turn Turn, I've played on my show multiple times, because I think it's so good. And I know you just did an interview with Mike Pengra. But tell me about some of the inspo behind Turn Turn Turn and how it really came to be. Because I saw one of your first shows at Icehouse. And now y'all are playing all over the map around Minnesota. And I just love it. I think your music is so great in that band too. So, talk to me a little bit about Turn Turn Turn.

Adam: Well, I sort of liken it to Hookers & Blow when the Honeydogs were getting kind of exhausted. Hookers & Blow became a place of refuge and fun like … it's like a bowling night. You know, you're hanging out with your friends, you're playing your favorite music. This was like the equivalent of that. But in a more singer-songwriter way that I thought I could do for parties or something, like I could create a little project where it would be me and a couple of women's voices and do three-part harmonies and do my favorite country, blues, folk rock, whatever stuff, and generally from like the ‘60s or ‘70s.

Barb Brynstad and I were kind of friends at that time that this idea was coming up, and she and I started it with my daughter Ava first, did a couple shows, and then Ava sort of was too busy. And so reached out to Savannah, who was a former songwriting student, and started doing these shows and played a bunch of them, and was just enjoying doing a cover band thing, like just three-part harmonies, doing covers. And we did a show and Barb — we'd run out of material, and Barb reaches over to Savannah, leans over and says, "Why don't you do one of yours?" And I kind of cringed like, "I don't want to do my own music in this. I just want to do covers." Savanah did her song, people loved it. And then a light went off like, "Wow, maybe we could do — I got tons of songs, maybe we could do an originals record." And then we were off to the races.

Once we got in the studio, and we're working together, it's like, "Damn, this sounds pretty good." And we were no longer a cover band after that. Although, you know, we'll still throw in a few cover songs. But it's nice, because I feel like I don't have to do all the heavy lifting in the band. There's two really good singers and they are songwriters as well. And I guess I feel like I get to do as much as I want in that band or as little as I want to do. And it feels really nice to not be centered in a way that I felt like I was before.

Noah: When there's three front people, that's a pretty nice thing from an audience perspective. Probably easier on you too.

Adam: It is a lot easier. And other people can talk. I don't feel like I always got to talk and all of that. But I think we've just done it for a while, and we feel comfortable with each other, and we kind of poke fun at each other, and we've got our weak spots. And you know, I think we just know how to have fun doing it. And it's really open-ended. Like, I think we can make different styles of music. It's welcoming to a lot of different stuff. The last record we made I would say it's kind of like a psychedelic country record. But who knows what the next thing we'll do is. So it just feels really fun.

The Honeydogs’ Everything, I Bet You vinyl release party. With Humbird and Jake La Botz. 7 p.m., Friday, June 30. Tickets.