honeybee bring saturn return EP to NKC Fall Fest on Saturday afternoon

honeybee. // Photo by Haley Mullenix

As an increasingly old rock’n’roll fan, I still haven’t complained that concerts are getting too loud. I’m fairly certain the shows in my youth destroyed the frequencies that would allow me to be bothered by all that. But increasingly, I join in with the public that clamors for concerts where a headliner might actually take the stage before 10 p.m. on a weeknight. [While this has been the subject of several different rounds of online discourse, late start times have increasingly become the source of a few lawsuits. So when I say the people clamor for a reasonable rock time, I’m not being lame. Well, at least not lame and alone.]

This is all to say that tomorrow afternoon, North KC is putting on a festival that runs from noon to 5 p.m. and a lot of our favorite bands and brewers in the city will be there. At the appropriate time for a weekend band and brew adventure that gets you home in time for Netflix marathoning—like a real adult.

NKC Fall Fest 2 features The Freedom Affair, honeybee, Timbers, and Whiskey Mash Band in Downtown North Kansas City. In addition to music, the now-annual event features KC’s craft brew scene, yard games, kids crafts, and more.

Ahead of the event, we took the opportunity to hop on a quick call with Makayla Scott of the band honeybee. Scott has been making music for more than a decade, and in honeybee she’s taken a solo project and expanded it into one of the most exciting bands in town—alongside familiar scene faces like guitarist Michael Schley, bassist Al Gliesman, and drummer Luke Ford.

Their recent EP saturn return has been on heavy play on our Spotify over the last few weeks. If you’re gonna throw on one track, make it “pomegranite” which is in the running for one of our favorite local singles of the year right now. So of course we’re stoked to catch them in the sunshine(? hopefully?) tomorrow afternoon. Tickets are available here.

The Pitch: We’ve been meaning to sit down with you for a while now. Every time your song “pomegranate” comes on The Bridge, we were Shazam’ing it and once you’ve Shazam’d a song to find the artist three different times, you know that you’re officially “a fan” and need to track them down. Tell us about how your career moved from the beginning up until the formation of honeybee.

Makayla Scott: I’ve been in the scene, playing in bands since 2013 with my first band. I was a freshman in college back in Springfield when we started Blue False Indigo. We were together for eight or nine years, and even moved to KC together. We tried to continue our trajectory with our career but pandemic complicated things for us, and we set it aside in 2022. I’d been writing songs for a solo project at the time. It was just a little thing to keep me interested and involved, so when the main band dissolved, I put my eggs in this new basket. The other three musicians were a very natural series of additions, from my former band’s guitarist to my partner on bass, and then we met our drummer playing Manor Fest in 2023 because we were sharing a bill with bands he played in. We paired up and got started right away. About a year and a half of playing was all it took to get us to the saturn return EP recordings.

I’ve never heard of someone’s first band lasting eight years. That’s impressive. What keeps you together through all that, and a move? 

It didn’t hurt that we were all bandmates and best friends. We loved hanging out and making music.

honeybee. // Photo by Katie Rich

Isn’t it nice when you’ve got a relationship partner who can pick up a bass and fill in on a band? It’s handy!

It’s wonderful. It’s a bonus that Al is also an amazing singer and songwriter in their own right, and they used to front a band, so they contain multitudes. Honestly, everyone in the band is a songwriter and has an ear for how to bring something wildly unexpected to the table. It elevates the musicality of everything we do.

When you started originally writing these solo songs, what were you exploring that you couldn’t do in your band at the time, and how did that feed into a different launching point for honeybee? 

There was a different vocal approach. The last group was what we called a “spooky folk band,” and everything was sung in three-part harmonies. So this was me taking a bit more ownership vocally and lyrically—writing for my own voice and my own approach. It opened emotional doors for me and allowed me to be more authentic in my songwriting.

Many of the lyrics and approach on this EP come from a place of “advice to my past self”—very diary-focused and confessional. 

It’s not intentional, it just sort of happens. Everything right now feels deeply personal.

Was it a deliberate choice to leave these songs in an arrangement where—okay, so a good chunk of the tracks on the EP open with just you and your instrument, and then the rest of the band seems to jump in as a surprise between the 30 to 45-second marks? Was that an intentional choice to keep these solo-written songs in a space where you could hear the bare bones version as it was written and then bring in the big fuller picture? 

A good question. In hindsight we realized we had that formula we were sticking to on the EP. Our drummer, Luke, has a great philosophy, which is that if I’m starting a song solo, it had better be a damn good song. So that means there are a lot of tracks here we could agree were just damn good songs.

What are the plans for the future of the group, heading into 2025?

We’re looking at another EP because our songwriting process didn’t stop when we wrapped the last one. We’ve already got this great collection of new songs we’re currently calling “Season Two.” We’re working with the same person who engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered our last record: Ian Dobyns from Element Recording Studio. He’s been an amazing collaborator. There’s no title or date for it yet, but we do plan to get it out into the world really, really soon.

honeybee. // Photo by Katie Rich

You’ve said that some of these songs were written two years or so ago and that you worried they were timing out or becoming too old. I think that’s such a wild thing to hear, considering how long people can let songs gestate before recording them, without worrying they were decaying. Is there a method here to try to keep recording these shorter albums so that everything stays fluid, quick, and honest about who you are right in that moment? 

I get bored easily and I’m always excited about something new. I didn’t want to forget the great thing I have that a little bit older, but I am constantly itching to move forward. Liking things less when they’ve started to age just a little bit—that’s a me problem, but not the worst problem a songwriter can have.

Anything in particular you’re excited about with Saturday’s NKC Fall Fest?

We’re just gonna manifest a beautiful day and it’ll be an awesome event. There aren’t that many great fall festivals in Kansas City, probably from how little of “fall” we get in general. But this isn’t a late-night show, so if you’re down to catch our band at 1 p.m. on a Saturday in early November, here’s your chance. I think the whole festival will be a great experience.