With cosmic Americana/string band The Wild Honey Collective playing SpeakEZ Lounge Wednesday, we asked its frontman to list recordings that impacted him. View a video of the band; listen to its music.
The Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds and Beyond: Some of Tommy McCord’s influences. (Photo/Anna Sink)
EDITOR’S NOTE: All musicians can trace their inspiration to key recordings that influenced their careers. Local Spins today showcases music that changed the world for West Michigan guitarist and record label operator Tommy McCord of The Wild Honey Collective. Scroll down for a Spotify playlist of his picks, including a couple of Wild Honey Collective tracks, and view a Local Spins video of a recent band performance. The Wild Honey Collective makes its SpeakEZ Lounge debut in Grand Rapids at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Details here.
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Tommy McCord, of Lansing, has been a guitarist, songwriter and performer in Michigan bands since 2000, originally with his hometown Ionia indie-rock band Drinking Mercury (currently on hiatus), followed by the Lansing punky trio The Plurals, which is working on its sixth album.
Mostly, however, he’s focused on the roots-oriented and prolific The Wild Honey Collective, which recently won a WYCE Jammie Award for best roots album for “The Wild Honey Collective, Vol. 3.” The band just recorded a live album with plans for releasing it later this year. (Watch a video of a live performances at the Jammies below.)
“In a lot of ways, making a fleshed-out live album of our spin on country/folk/Americana was one of my ultimate goals for this band, so it feels really nice to have reached this point with the project, which was born out of necessity as a quarantine recording thing in the spring of 2020,” he says.
Jammie Award Winners: The Wild Honey Collective (Photo/Anna Sink)
After playing SpeakEZ Lounge this week, the band will tour New England, with a summer tour planned for the Upper Peninsula, along with festival dates.
McCord also been involved in other projects along the way as well as serving as the “primary driver” of the independent record label GTG Records.
As for making these album picks, he prefaces it by saying: “My foundation for everything is The Beatles and The Beach Boys, with the popular grunge and alt-rock of my ’90s childhood filling in a lot of cracks. Music is a dynamic language and the signposts along the way change, but the musician and writer that I am in the early months of 2025 could point to something like this” (in terms of his album picks).
VIDEO: The Wild Honey Collective at The Intersection
1. The Byrds, “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” (1968) – A lot of my love and fascination for The Byrds involves the extended network of related bands. I might actually enjoy the offshoot bands/records that followed this album ore (namely, Flying Burrito Brothers “Gilded Palace of Sin” and Dillard & Clark “The Fantastic Expedition Of…” ), but those records wouldn’t exist without this alternately inspired and naive exploration of country music by a group of bizarrely confident hippies. This record always goes by as a smooth listen for me; I love the production and arrangements and my love for classic country music, bluegrass (thus leading to Old & In The Way and eventually my Grateful Dead fandom) and “Bob Dylan Basement Tapes” songs (thus leading to my later-in-life realization that The Band was probably the greatest American band to ever exist) all start here. I had the idea to put together The Wild Honey Collective basically 100 percent because of this album.
Listen: “One Hundred Years From Now”
2. Hüsker Dü, “Flip Your Wig” (1985) – I attribute my love of live albums and murky production to the fact that early ’90s oldies radio (and thus more “primitive” recording techniques) was my introduction to the concept of loving music. I love a lot of electronic music and what could be categorized as dance-pop production, but with my rock ‘n’ roll, I don’t want the vocals loud and I want the drums to be back in the mix under the guitars. But because I’m a student of pop songs, if I can’t hum the tune and there’s no vocal harmonies, my mind is likely to wander so I’m extremely picky with my punk rock. Discovering Hüsker Dü was like realizing the punk band of my dreams actually existed, and there’s no better display of Bob Mould and Grant Hart’s impeccable writing than this slab of middling fidelity. My years of DIY touring and recording with The Plurals was all in search of this vibe, knowing that the brass ring probably wasn’t even there but reaching for it at top-speed is fun as hell.
Listen: “Makes No Sense At All”
3. Calliope, “(In)Organics” (1999) – I’m a loud champion of this Michigan space-rock band (who finally got some due a couple years back with their inclusion on Third Man Records’ “Southeast Of Saturn” compilation) and while I’ve rarely copped their sound (my guitar parts on Drinking Mercury records aside), they have an important place in my heart and history as the first example of people I personally knew that made records that I thought were equal to or better than the indie/alternative rock being pushed by the major publicists on radio and TV. Elements of psychedelia, new wave, folk, shoegaze, jazz and classic pop abound on all of their records. I single out “(In)Organics” because it was the first one entirely self-recorded by the band in a home studio, which remains a very inspirational achievement. In 2023, Wild Honey put out a fleshed-out Laurel Canyon arrangement of this album’s acoustic song, “Told You So,” and our live-favorite country weeper, “The Mighty Plea,” was written by one of these guys, so this band is very much in my DNA in all sorts of ways.
Listen: “Did You Get What You Came For”
Currently Loving: “Dick’s Picks Volume 36” (Recorded in 1972, released in 2005) – As alluded above, I’m grumpy with modern production, so I’ve drifted away from a lot of current indie-rock and punk. I’ve really enjoyed the latest releases by Sierra Ferrell and my old Ionia VFW punk show chum Billy Strings, but I’ve just really been on a hard, live Grateful Dead kick for the last several months. “Dick’s Picks 36: Philadelphia 9/21/72” is scratching my garage blues acid country itch very nicely this week.
Listen: “Morning Dew”
ALBUMS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: Tommy McCord’s Playlist on Spotify
The Wild Honey Collective (Courtesy Photo)
