with Honor by August

By Mike Hume

Here’s a story for you: Local pop band with ties to Georgetown University makes waves in the local D.C. scene and ultimately snags an award handed out by Billboard. Sounds like Vertical Horizon, right? Guess again.

While the story sounds the same, the antagonist of this local success story is up-and-coming sensation Honor by August. Building upon a slew of recent successes, sterling reviews and ever-burgeoning local support, the D.C.-based band hopes that it can pen a career of even more enduring success than their fellow Hoyas.

Despite the inclination of music writers and publicists to group the two ... well, groups ... together, the similarities really end with the back stories.

Same city: Check. Same school: Check. Same genre: Check. Same sound: (::Supply your own buzzer noise here::)

While three of Honor by August’s members attended school at Georgetown (front man Michael Pearsall is a senior, guitarist Evan Field graduated from the foreign language program and bassist Joe Wenger picked up his masters in English), and the bands share the same spawning ground (in the musical sense) and genre, any other attempt at connecting them is a stretch at best.

Honor by August’s sound channels little of their GU pop predecessors’ influence and features a distinct lyrical cadence all Pearsall’s own. Now, with their lineup cemented after adding drummer Brian Shanley last April, and a name change from Motive to Honor by August, the band prove that difference on their first full-length release Drowning Out the Television, slated for a March 21 release.

“We really feel that we’re developing our own sound,” Field says. “We’ll bring something to the group and we’ll start playing and go: ‘Hey, that sounds like us.’ And the more that happens, the less we’ll be pigeonholed.”

The pure pop-rock effort packs at least two tracks that ought to snare some air time, specifically opener “Only in Photographs” and its bookend ballad, “The Quiet Sky.”

Television’s production duo of Ted Comerford and Jeff Juliano have enjoyed some success of their own. Comerford recently saw one of his other bands, Army of Me, signed to a deal with Atlantic Records. Juliano hasn’t been slacking either, with Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer serving as the jewels in the crown of his robust career.

“We joke that it’s a good time to be a ‘Ted’ band,” Field says. “And it’s been a good time to be a ‘Jeff’ band for 10 years.”

Of course, it might just be a good time to be Honor by August. The March CD release and the sometime-in-April local release party ought to serve as a cap to a great chapter in the band’s short-lived career. In the past year they’ve won the pop category of Billboard Magazine’s World Song contest with a live recording of “Only in Photographs,” taped at the band’s first-ever electric gig. They’ve conquered a battle of the bands to play 9:30 Club with Hanson and prevailed over 150 local bands in a competition to open for Bon Jovi at a sold-out MCI Center in December.

Despite the stretch of success, things haven’t gotten much easier financially for the upstart band. They’ve all had to make sacrifices. Wenger works a desk job he swears he never would have taken if not for the band, and Field had to sell his jeep for a more practical, and band-essential, van. (“I miss it terribly,” Field laments.) However, their small business bank account is growing, and the band is starting to pay for itself. Of course, given their recent good luck in contests, maybe one of them should have picked up a lotto ticket or two.

Speaking of luck, they’ve got the karma angle covered too. Taking a lesson from Earl J. Hickey (not to mention their own kind hearts: “Good things happen to good people and we try to live by that,” Pearsall says.), they’ve already signaled their interest in setting up a charitable foundation if they ever hit it big. And who knows, perhaps believing in the karmic teachings of Carson Daly, as Earl does, will help the group land on TRL.

But banking on luck or karma (regardless of the teachings of NBC’s “My Name Is Earl”) short changes the professional and business-like approach the band has taken. After celebrating their selection as the Bon Jovi opener, the band put their self-marketing machine into overdrive, whipping up 3,000 free sampler CDs and 5,000 postcards to give away at the show. After a thirty-minute set, which felt like 30-seconds according to Wenger, and distributing the 8,000 handouts in a matter of minutes, HBA’s Web traffic exploded. Page views went from the low 100s to about 2,000 per day, with many visitors adding their names to the band’s mailing list.

That business savvy approach, coupled with an arsenal of talent, Comerford’s hot hand and Juliano’s Midas touch, will likely be what leads Honor by August up the Potomac and into the national mainstream ... just like Vertical Horizon did back in their day. But Honor by August is aiming higher.

“I think they sort of took off quickly and then leveled off,” says Field, who attended GU while Vertical Horizon’s Matt Scannell and Keith Kain also roamed the Hilltop. “We’d be much happier rising slower and lasting longer.”

Still, while all signs point towards a near-term ascent by Honor by August (the album is already available for pre-order on awaremusic.com, the same site that helped launch the careers of Edwin McCain, Matchbox 20, Mayer, and Counting Crows when they were still going by Tabitha’s Secret), they’re not there yet. That’s a good thing for local fans who can see them in intimate settings like IOTA Club and Café, where they played last Sunday. They next take the stage at Whitlow’s on Wilson, Monday, March 3.