We here at New Noise (and presumably you as well) have rediscovered many truths in our ongoing Pet Sounds series. For one, there’s often more than meets the eye with musicians infatuated with heavy, edgy music. Many of them prize their adorable critters as much as their art, even. Also, there are animal lovers—and there are animal lovers. After recently checking in with Luna Honey from Philadelphia, it’s more than safe to say that the eccentric dark rock experimentalists comfortably fit into the latter category. Just about as comfortably as they get along with their Noah’s Ark-level assortment of pets, per the heart-melting photos they sent us.
Maura Pond, Benjamin Schurr, and Levi Flack incorporate a wild assortment of instruments into Luna Honey records, the most recent of which—Bound—came out earlier this month. Luna Honey tinker with drum machines, harmonica, kazoo, marxophone, and prepared piano, to name a few. Eclipsing that short list of unconventional music devices, however, is the number of pets the three members of Luna Honey have between them: seven.
Pond and Schurr have a 4-year-old basset hound named Roux, but Flack is the real home zookeeper, so to speak. His crew consists of: Sebastian, a 15-year-old black domestic short hair cat; Stoney (age unknown), a gray and white spotted domestic short hair cat; Winston, a 5-year-old show shoe siamese cat; Aziraphale (“Zero,” for short), a 1-year-old white Bichon dog; Mikey, a 4-month-old Yorkshire terrier mix; and Spot, an 11-year-old hypo melanistic morph Leopard gecko.
We interviewed all the musicians who comprise Luna Honey more extensively than our previous subjects. Hey, there were a lot of furry friends (and Spot) to discuss. Here’s our conversation with Luna Honey in just about its entirety:
How did you get introduced to each of your pets?
Levi: My beloved kitty Sebastian showed up on my doorstep 15 years ago while I was living in Sacramento, California. It was fate. I love him more than anything.
My partner Meaghan took in Spot when one of her coworkers decided she couldn’t take care of him anymore. Her cat Winston wouldn’t leave his tank alone out of curiosity. I ended up taking Spot to get him away from those prying eyes and give him some peace.
Maura: Roux is a basset hound that came from a breeder on a farm in Maryland that I found after not being able to get one through a rescue. She’s a quarantine pup we got in 2020.
Ben: In the beginning of lockdown, Maura and I got obsessed with basset hound videos and entered a weird hound-centric fugue state of magical thinking. There was a lake in Maryland right outside of DC where we would visit from time to time from (D.C. neighborhood) Anacostia, and as we were leaving we saw a wandering figure in the road that turned out to be a basset hound. We helped it out of the road. It felt like a sign.
Levi: I rescued Stoney from (Philadelphia animal shelter) ACCT with a dental infection. She was on a short list to be euthanized, since nobody wanted to take on a cat with expensive vet bills. She’s a bowling ball of a cat who’s sweeter than anything. She’s Ben and Maura’s favorite, I think.
I got Aziraphale (Zero) for Meaghan after her dog Boo died. I said yes to the first dog I saw, this white fluffy thing. And though it took some time for him to grow on us, he’s literally our son now.
Winston came along with Meaghan when she moved in. For better or for worse, he’s here now. He’s mean, but at least here he doesn’t bother the lizard, and Meaghan’s mom likes him.
Mikey (dog) is the newest addition. We haven’t officially adopted him yet, but it’s coming soon. We got him from (Paws Rescue Inc.) as foster parents. Mikey and Zero immediately bonded. Now we can’t separate them, so he’s ours. We still plan to foster more.
Levi, what inspired or obligated you to take in so many pets?
Levi: I grew up with a lot of pets. When I was a kid I had mice, fish, a guinea pig, cats, lizards. I never had a dog. I like helping animals that need a home. Hell, I’ve done it for people more than once. Everything deserves to be loved and cared for. Plus they’re fucking cute, and I like my house feeling like a zoo.
Levi, which of your pets get along the best? Which ones don’t?
Levi: Well none of the cats get along with Winston, but that dumb cat is especially good with the dogs. I don’t know why, maybe because he was raised by a grumpy old Yorkie, but that cat absolutely loves dogs. Mikey and Zero are inseparable. Spot is a loner, naturally.
It’s said that humans often take on some of their pet’s qualities over time and vice versa. Have you noticed that not only in your relationships with your pets but among the pets themselves?
Maura: I’m stubborn and obstinate, and I have clearly genetically passed this onto my daughter, who is a dog.
Levi: I definitely puppy play with the dogs. When they get really low and put their paws forward and sploot, it’s adorable. I don’t know if it’s a shared behavior, but I think they’re all very food motivated just like me. The dogs are complete mirrors of each other. They will walk perfectly in sync side by side like they’re conjoined.
Maura and Ben, how does your obsession with your dog manifest itself (really long walks, expensive food, endless TLC, etc.)?
Maura: We sold the D.C. house and moved to get a bigger yard for the dog.
Ben: Long walks are integral to keeping my sanity in general. With Roux, I’m constantly both amused and inspired by her on walks. Since she’s a scent hound, she’s always snuffling in this cartoonish way that reminds me there are so many ways to perceive the world, and as humans we’re totally oblivious to this scent universe. I also have written a lot of songs (some totally dumb and some that actually became songs) on these walks, and it kinda just allows me to keep my subconscious flowing. We also totally spoil this dog with toys, treats, and just a far higher quality of living then I allow myself.
Have any of your pets made appearances, in audio or visual form, in any of your video, album art, lyrics, etc.?
Maura: I thought it would be funny to quietly sneak Roux barking at the end of “Vacuum Cleaner,” but due to mixing constraints and her general stubborn diva nature, we weren’t able to get the perfect angry barking at the vacuum cleaner sound. So for Luna Honey, no. No pet appearances. My love is a private love.
Ben: At one point she became fixated on eating cassettes and destroyed one of my favorite Mississippi records mixtapes and strewed the tape across the backyard in Richmond. I found it a couple days later bleaching in the sun, took the spool and made a tape loop which found its way into a song called “war of attrition” but the loop itself is called “eternal loop from the inside of a dog.” She has appeared in a few of the album covers for my solo project, Ruah. She’s on the first album cover as well as a few singles, and there’s references to her in a few upcoming songs off the upcoming record.
What was the wildest scene involving any of your pets that any of you witnessed?
Maura: Roux went through a period of hunting cicadas. We have a dog door, and she’d bring them into the house and then run around like mad. The first time it happened, we could not figure out what was going on because she was hiding it in her mouth, and it was screaming from inside her jaws. It just looked like this horrible noise was emanating off the dog. You don’t realize how loud those things are until you hear them indoors. She specializes in more banal chaos than wild scenes.
Please detail another one or two of the best anecdotes involving your pets.
Ben: At one point, Roux counter-surfed an entire pound of butter, which we learned by finding the shredded package in our backyard in Richmond. Panicked, we thought she ate the whole thing only to realize she strategically divided the butter and buried it in different parts of the yard. So over the coming weeks we would her eating small bits of the dirt covered butter in small basset organized portions.
Maura: Yeah, it was late when we got back and discovered the butter incident. If you Google what happens if a dog eats a pound of butter, the internet, because it is the internet, will tell you probable death or organ failure, so we were trying to figure out how much she had actually eaten. I had a moment in the backyard realizing it was 2am and we were wandering around the yard with a shovel frantically digging to collect these butter-dirt clods and the neighbors probably thought we had lost our minds. She was fine. She was so proud.
“We thought she ate the whole thing only to realize she strategically divided the butter and buried it in different parts of the yard.”
Levi, you’re the first participant in this series who has a pet lizard. Can you share two or three aspects/duties of taking care of a lizard that might surprise people?
Levi: Well you have to feed them live bugs, which was an adjustment. And Spot is a bad hunter, so I’ll have to grab a bug with tweezers and wiggle it in front of his face in order for him to eat. Temperature control is a huge deal. His tank has to have a basking zone and a cool zone all while the ambient temperature stays between 70-80 degrees. Enrichment is also important. They’ll hide all day if they don’t feel engaged and enriched by the stuff in their enclosure, so you need to keep them interested in order for them to get any exercise.
Have you ever tried to corral all your combined pets into one area or would it be impossible? Which one of your pets seem most attuned to what is going on in the world around them? Which one seems the most oblivious?
Levi: Well, I can’t really get Spot involved with the other pets. It’s like having a little alien that knows nothing of how other creatures interact while simultaneously being small enough for them to eat. Sebastian has sniffed him before though. The rest of the pets often join us on the couch for TV time. Also sometimes I’ll find anywhere between two to four pets in the bed competing for room.
Maura: Roux’s visited Levi’s for band practice and knows Sebastian, who she is both intrigued by and terrified of. She’s generally oblivious and fixated on one thing at a time.
Grab Luna Honey music (including badass cassettes) on the band’s website.
Photos courtesy of Luna Honey
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