Hembree’s Isaac Flynn is having one hell of an August

Hembree. // image courtesy the artist

Hembree frontman Isaac Flynn is involved  with two features from The Pitch this month. Not only did his band contribute music to the soundtrack for the hilarious new mockumentary American Comic, but Flynn produced the upcoming EP from rising country musician Lauren Lovelle. Add in the fact that Hembree just released their own new EP, Dive Bar Funeral, played the Hinterland Festival at the start of the month, and will rock the stage of Liberty Hall on Saturday, August 16 (with Lovelle and a reunited Cowboy Indian Bear opening, no less) to celebrate their tenth anniversary, and you can easily say that Flynn is having a bit of a moment.

When we spoke with Flynn a few weeks back, he’d just attended a show at Los Angeles club Largo the night before for a comedy show featuring John Mulaney and Ali Wong, which seemed like a great intro into finding out just how Hembree became Los Angeles’ most comedy-connected band.

“When we first moved, here we would go to this wine tasting every Wednesday, which sounds fancier than it is,” Flynn recalls over the phone. “It’s just like this cool wine shop that had funky wines and stuff, and the pizza shop would have some focaccia they made. It was a great hang, and it was like 15 bucks, and you got a bunch of unlimited wine and cheese, so it was great.”

Then, one night in 2019, the band’s Alex Ward saw a thing for a free comedy show, but Flynn begged off to go home. The next day, Ward told Flynn about how great the show, Rod Stewart Live, was, and informed the rest of the band that they were all going the next week. It ended up being so fun, it became their new weekly hang, and the hosts–James Austin Johnson, Sam Wiles, and Zach Pugh–would go on to become some of the band’s best friends (Johnson would also go on to Saturday Night Live and Wiles is in American Comic), thanks to a random joke Wiles made one night about Overland Park.

“Our Kansas radars just completely went off,” explains Flynn. “At the end of the show he’s like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m like, from St. Louis, grew up in Iowa,’ and then we just were talking and our Midwestern personalities linked to like, ‘Oh, we gotta hang out.’”

Alex Ward ended up throwing a backyard comedy show when life came back after the first round of Covid vaccinations, with a bill featuring Johnson, future American Comic writer and star Joe Kwaczala, and Liza Treyger.

“That whole crew, man, just became such good friends of ours,” Flynn continues. “Sam’s wedding was just like an indie comedy goldmine. The speeches were Zach Pugh into Kwaczala, then James, and then Alex, and I played a Blink-182 song. We know more comedians than musicians at this point. Like Andrew Dismukes was at the wedding. It’s wild.”

If you think about it, it’s kind of funny that Flynn and his bandmates have become so enmeshed with Los Angeles indie comedians, because his father, John Flynn, plays guitar for Kansas City yacht rock tribute Summer Breeze, who act as the backing band for the annual Thundergong! benefit. In other words, the elder Flynn has hung and with and musically supported everyone from Jason Sudeikis to Weird Al Yankovic/

“My dad and his best friend, Will Forte,” jokes Flynn. That said, the comedy connection resulted in Hembree getting a pretty big opportunity in American Comic. Not only were a couple of the band’s songs featured, but the group also recorded a theme song that plays over the end credits.

“The little fun fact nugget about the end song was that the temp track was a Black Keys song,” Flynn says. “They were like, ‘Something like this,’ so Alex and I first were like, ‘Okay, let’s do, I guess a Black Keys song,’ and they were polite and they were like, ‘Guys, a little too Black Keys.’”

That musical swing demonstrates the versatility of what Flynn and Hembree can do. One wouldn’t really expect that these hard-edged dancey pop songmakers could emulate the bluesy sounds of the Black Keys, but then again, you also wouldn’t expect to find Flynn producing a country EP, either, which makes his involvement with Lauren Lovelle’s new music all the more interesting.

As Lovelle herself noted, she met Flynn and Hembree when her band opened for them at the Percheron Rooftop Bar not even a year ago.

“I was just like, ‘Oh man, this band is great,’” remembers Flynn. “’These songs are great.’ Lauren’s such a talented writer and I was just like, ‘Man, I would just love to help get the music out in the world and get it recorded at a level that it deserves to be recorded at.’”

For Flynn, working with Lovelle was a refreshing project because, he says, he’s so used to really getting into the nitty-gritty of the production, with very detailed synthesizer parts overlapping with intricate little guitar lines that have to fit perfectly in there.

“Everything’s really crafted,” the musician offers, continuing on to say that, while he loves doing that, what Flynn enjoyed about working on the Lovelle songs was that it was more of a Rick Rubin style of production: “Where you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t wanna screw this up, so I’m just gonna make sure the song structure feels great and that the song itself feels great and the tones are cool and from there, let Lauren and the band take it.’”

Flynn says that the process was fun, old-school recording where they’d get the song dialed in, then hit record, and that’s the take.

“It has an Eagles at the Troubadour 1970s feel where everybody’s playing with everyone,” says Flynn of the vibe of Lovelle and her bandmates. “Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and Jackson Brown, that whole crew, but in Lawrence, Kansas, which is awesome.”

And on top of all of this, there’s Dive Bar Funeral, which is a bit of a surprise release. While Hembree teased it, the band had just released Better Days in August of last year, and dropping five whole new songs came as a bit of a jaw-dropper from a band whose release schedule is a pretty regular every two and a half years.

“Honestly, we wanted it to be a bit of a surprise release,” Flynn admits. “We had been sitting on a batch of songs. There were probably seven or eight that we just were like, ‘Well, we could try to cobble this together for an album, or we could pick the best five and have kind of a cohesive statement.’”

The five songs were all recorded at Alex Ward’s home, and Flynn describes the tunes as “pretty loose, but in a good way.”

“I think we understand the formula and honestly, man, Austin [Ward, drummer] was pushing us so hard,” Flynn says. “He was like, ‘We have all these great songs and they’re halfway done. What are we doing? We gotta get this stuff together and get it out in the world,’ and he was right.”

Hembree’s been enjoying the process of making big rock songs, and while Flynn says that maybe the next record will go back more into a groovy world, you know, Dive Bar Funeral feels perfect for a run of summer shows, with a vibe that’s super fun and playful.

“Everything’s kind of coming up roses right now, and it’s delightful to get to see it happen in real time,” Flynn says as we wrap up. “It’s so fun because, as terrible as the world is, we gotta have some moments of levity with this sort of stuff.”

Hembree plays Liberty Hall this Saturday, August 16, with Cowboy Indian Bear and Lauren Lovelle and the Midnight Spliffs. Details on that show here.