Money Time Love: On the eve of their breakthrough album release, Hembree is primed for Better Days (2024)

Upon learning that I wouldn’t get to chat with Hembree in person for this story, I was overcome with disappointment.

Virtual interviews just aren’t the same, I brooded. Something will inevitably be lost. I grew certain that—with them in L.A. and myself in Kansas City—the lack of face-to-face engagement would cause the group to hold back. I expected to walk away from the interview with no sense of their personal dynamic, no impression of how they get along, and no clue about what makes them tick. As far as I was concerned, my article was dead on arrival.

This was a failure on my part to recognize the significance of Hembree’s makeup. The band is composed of two brothers, two brothers-in-law, and a pair of childhood friends—and, as it turns out, these bonds are perceptible even from 1,600 miles away. The moment our video call commenced, the group was cracking jokes, riffing off each other, and screwing around the way only lifelong friends do. Yes, virtual interviews are far from ideal. Yes, something was lost—but, with a band like Hembree, it couldn’t have been much.

It helps that the group is in especially high spirits right now, and it isn’t hard to see why. This past May, they completed their third full-length album Better Days, scheduled for release on Aug. 9. The band will then play two album release shows at the Crossroads Hotel rooftop on Aug. 14 and 15.

This is all the more meaningful to Hembree, given the circ*mstances under which its previous album, It’s a Dream!, was created. Recording throughout 2020 as stay-at-home orders were in full swing, the band was forced into separation, with sessions conducted via Zoom, and song files shared back and forth via Dropbox links. On the few occasions that certain band members could meet in person, face masks were worn—protective against COVID, but certainly not conducive to feelings of creative spontaneity or camaraderie.

Hembree is a deeply symbiotic group. Each member plays a critical role in the album recording process, and it’s usual for the entire band to contribute to each song, trading ideas and feeding off each other’s energy. For a group like this, being splintered into isolation might as well have been a death sentence. Nay, it felt like something even worse than a death sentence—a day job.

“There were deadlines and things, but there wasn’t that human interaction,” bassist Garrett Childers says. “We weren’t getting to spend time with each other in person. We weren’t getting to play shows. So it felt much more like checklists.”

Following this experience, the recording process for Better Days—while otherwise typical—felt like a godsend.

As with most Hembree albums, the basic structures of each track were laid out by singer Isaac Flynn, who recorded a batch of 20 demos throughout 2022 and 2023 that were later fleshed out by the full band. Each musician brings his own unique skill set to the latter process—Alex Ward offers idiosyncratic guitar lines—“That’s lack of ability to play,” he shrugs. “It lends itself to being creative”—while his brother Austin provides attention to detail. Eric Davis ensures the band stays true to its voice, and Childers—by the rest of the group’s admission—has the sharpest sense of melody.

After narrowing down 15 of the strongest demos, the group recorded drums at Kingsize Soundlabs in Los Angeles, and other instrumental tracks at Peermusic’s recording studio and Flynn’s home. The bulk of the project emerged from Kingsize Soundlabs in Los Angeles. These 15 tracks were then pared down again to the 11 songs that make up the Better Days tracklist.

“We felt like we were discovering ourselves as a band again, as cliche as that might sound,” Flynn says.

The music itself drips with this feeling of gleeful rediscovery. The moodiness of signature tracks like “Culture” and “Holy Water” is largely absent—Instead, Hembree opts for swelling, ebullient choruses, trading the creeping textures of its biggest hits for a sound that’s slicker, sunnier, and more synth-driven. Though they’ll always consider themselves a Kansas City group, one gets the impression that L.A. has rubbed off on them quite a bit.

It’s not just the climate, either. Since moving to the city in 2019, Flynn has spent most of his time working as a professional songwriter for music publisher Peermusic—a line of work that’s allowed him to hone his craft considerably over the past five years. Thus, Better Days contains some of Hembree’s suavest, most finely executed tracks yet. Songwriting is like any other muscle. To get good at it, you simply have to do it a lot. And it’s increasingly clear that Flynn gets his reps in every day.

One of his main sources of inspiration is new pieces of musical equipment. If you’re a musician, you’re probably familiar with “gear acquisition syndrome”—the relentless urge to buy new instruments, effects pedals, and other baubles that obliterate your bank account and inevitably go unused. Flynn is the rare artist who turns this disease to his advantage. The songs on It’s A Dream! were largely built around a newly-acquired Roland Juno-106 synthesizer. For Better Days, his weapon of choice was a 1990 Roland Rhodes, which he discovered in the garage of a home he was looking to rent. He didn’t wind up signing the lease but instead walked away with the hulking digital piano for $100.
However, the most crucial piece of songwriting wisdom that Flynn has picked up through his work is to simply write what you would want to hear.

“Everyone I know who I think is incredibly good at songwriting stays so true to themselves, and they don’t chase the money, or lack thereof,” Flynn says. “I think people can tell when it’s authentic and real.”

It’s tempting to write this off as a tired platitude, and, well, maybe it is. But it’s trite only because it’s worth saying again and again, especially in the contemporary music industry, where content is too often prized over creativity. As artists are increasingly expected to tailor their music for maximum virality and to constantly satisfy the almighty algorithm, staying true to oneself—not an easy task to begin with—is perhaps more challenging than ever.

“There’s a lot of pressure to have a pretty immediate hook or some sort of grab that’s going to get that attention span of a viewer scrolling on their phone,” Austin says. “They hear five seconds of something, and that five seconds has to be an attention-grabber.”

Unsurprisingly, these pressures have proved deleterious to artists’ mental health, and many have chosen to retreat from social media entirely. But logging off is a privilege afforded only to those who are already successful enough to not have to play the game in the first place. Smaller artists aren’t so lucky, and “digital burnout” has rapidly become endemic among musicians. As vivacious as Flynn and his bandmates are, even they grew disillusioned with the music industry for a period of time.

Fighting Fatigue

Post-pandemic, Hembree found itself mired in an endlessly demanding digital landscape. Before they knew it, they were caught in the pernicious cycle of churning out nonstop content to feed the insatiable algorithm beast. Flynn calls it the “music casino”—a digital netherworld where artists shuffle in and out like ghosts, chasing the ever-elusive viral moment in the hope that they can one day rise above the attention-sucking din.

“You put so much of your time and energy into it, and you’re like, ‘Man, is this even worth it?’” he says. “We have to basically make a bunch of social media videos and hope that an algorithm puts our song into a different stratosphere.”

The stringent demands of social media aren’t the only thing bogging so many musicians down. There’s also the sorry state of the modern touring business. Granted, traveling cross-country in a van with five grown men has never been the most regal affair. But after the pandemic, a slew of factors created the perfect storm for smaller artists—diminished audiences, surging costs of gas, food, and lodging, and, of course, much-dreaded “merch cuts”—a common practice by which live venues take a hefty percentage of artists’ merchandise sales.

Hembree is no stranger to these challenges, and many of its peers have been forced to stop touring altogether.

“I know people are like, ‘Shut up! Go sleep on a floor.’ But it’s like, man, I’m 32 years old,” Flynn says. “I’ve been playing in a band forever.”
“We’ve all slept on floors,” Austin mutters, to which his brother adds, “Hembree’s paid its dues.”

To ease the burden of food costs, Hembree launched a tongue-in-cheek fundraising campaign earlier this year. The premise was simple: Fans were encouraged to Venmo the band during its February 2024 tour, with the guarantee that their money would be spent exclusively at local Chili’s restaurants on the road. In return, donors were each given a shoutout on Hembree’s Instagram story and were sent exclusive photos of the group’s dining experience.

“The last time we went to Chili’s on this past tour, we were like, ‘We officially have to take a break from eating here,’ because it was physically weighing us down a little bit,” Austin says. His brother concurs, calling it a “joke that went a little too far.”

The Hembree Chili’s tour fund might have been a joke, but like all good jokes, there’s a sad truth at the heart of it—Even after your band has existed for a decade, the mental and material pitfalls will persist. You will continue to sleep on floors. You will fork your merch profits over to venues. You will resort to fundraising for a Chicken Crispers combo meal, and you will like it.

If Flynn and Co. were still in their 20s, this wouldn’t be such a bad way to live. When you’re young, you can get away with sleeping in a van and living off of QuikTrip hot dogs. But now that the group is in their 30s—with Flynn, Davis, and Childers having families to support—the touring lifestyle is much harder to sustain.

“In the past, I don’t feel like there was anyone missing me on that intense level, like a kid misses their dad, or a spouse misses their husband or wife,” Childers says. “As we’ve grown up as people, you learn that a lot of decisions aren’t made to help these touring musicians. They’re not made to make their personal lives any easier.”

Recording It’s a Dream! in solitude, getting trapped in the music casino, grappling with the utterly bleak touring business—eventually, it all became too much for Hembree, resulting in a period of burnout that the group has only just started to recover from.

In this regard, Better Days seems like an apt title. But the post-pandemic music industry remains fraught, especially for smaller acts like Hembree. Touring is still unaffordable for grassroots musicians, and the problems of streaming and social media aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. This begs the question: How exactly are these “better days?”

Rhythm Revival

Perhaps these aren’t actually better days, and maybe the album title is a bit of a misnomer. After all, Hembree hasn’t experienced a change in circ*mstances—only a change in attitude. At the beginning of 2024, they gathered for a band meeting during which they laid out a goal for the new year—ditch the pessimism, and adopt a more positive outlook on the music business, despite all its broken aspects.

Of course, positively thinking isn’t some sort of cure-all—embracing a sh*tty situation doesn’t make it any less sh*tty, nor is Hembree naive enough to think so. But sometimes it’s the best you can do, and it certainly makes a difference.

For Hembree, this change in attitude often means finding creative opportunities in unlikely places, including the music casino. Instead of viewing social media as a detriment to creativity, the group now considers it a tool, like anything else on the artist’s palette. “Content creation” and “artistry” are not diametrically opposed, they argue, and the promotional requirements of social media are only as deleterious to a musician’s integrity as they let it be.

“Austin and I have backgrounds in video editing, and we’re huge film buffs,” Alex says. “We’ve had the opportunity to use some of those skills for social media content.”

And besides, even if you disagree about the artistic potential of the digital landscape, you can’t escape the fact that this is how the music business operates now. As Flynn points out, artists can either accept this and adapt accordingly, or remain disaffected and potentially fall to the wayside.

“There’s always been some completely bullsh*t aspect to the music industry throughout its entire history,” he says. “So right now, if that’s navigating the algorithms and a demand for content, then that’s not the worst thing in the world. Times have changed, and we never want to be too big of naysayers.”

But perhaps the most important change has been realizing that these responsibilities, while important, are merely secondary to the simple thrill of writing and performing songs with your friends. As precarious as life can be as a smaller act, the music makes it infinitely worthwhile.

This was easy to lose sight of during the isolated recording of It’s A Dream!. But after recording together for the first time in two years for Better Days, Hembree was reminded not to take the joys of being in a band for granted. Following lockdown, the group was more eager than ever to perform together and enjoy the freewheeling creative process that attracted them to a music career in the first place. In a catalog of highly collaborative records, Better Days might be the band’s most collaborative one yet.

If there’s one song that encapsulates the spirit of the project, it’s “Wenatchee.” The track came together in the city of the same name—located in Washington state and dubbed the “Apple Capital of the World” for its many orchards—as the band conducted a soundcheck before a show at its performing arts center in Oct. 2022.

With the sound technician distracted by the Seattle Mariners playoff game on TV, Flynn, Davis, and the Ward brothers decided to jam over a guitar riff to pass the time. Childers, who was busy setting up the merch table in another room, initially thought the song was being played over the venue’s P.A. system. After realizing the music was coming from his bandmates, he suggested they develop the piece further.

This not only reflects the collaborative nature of Better Days, but also the group’s commitment to embracing a more positive outlook on the music industry—with the right attitude, even something as tedious as a soundcheck can offer a creative opportunity.

Another crucial experience happened over the course of ten days in Oct. 2023, when Flynn lived with Nashville-based boy band Post Sex Nachos to produce its latest album, Prima/Vera.

The opportunity to work with the band renewed Flynn’s excitement for the album recording process. He later channeled this excitement into the remaining work for Better Days, which was halfway complete at this point. To an extent, his work on Prima/Vera influenced the sound of Better Days as well. Flynn’s approach as a producer was to retain Post Sex Nacho’s live energy as much as possible, which later compelled him to make sure Better Days didn’t sound too sterile or overproduced upon returning to L.A.

The ten-day period also brought on a deluge of memories for Flynn. Being with Post Sex Nachos—a relatively young group—in its home studio reminded him of his own beginnings with Hembree when he was still recording at his parents’ house in Lawrence, KS.
“It was a full-circle sort of moment for me,” Flynn says. “A reminder of how awesome it is to record music with a crew of people you really care about.”

On to the next

With just two months left before the release of Better Days, Hembree is feeling a strange mix of emotions. Pride. Excitement. A trace of anxiety. But by the time it comes out, these will have mostly subsided, and the group expects to, instead, feel slightly bored with the project. At that point, they’ll be so accustomed to the material, so exhausted by the release process, that Better Days will, ironically, sound old to them.

“It’s weird, because it’s this thing that you’re chipping away at for so long, and it feels so important, and it’s your whole life, and then you get the masters back, and it’s done and you feel like, ‘What do I do now?’” Flynn says. “Yeah, I guess on to the next one.”

Such is life—even after accomplishing something great, your happiness rarely lasts. At best, most of your time will be spent in utter tedium. But, as Hembree has discovered, recognizing this can be liberating. It’s not that the group no longer aspires for success—They continue to challenge themselves and take their craft seriously. However, now that they’re able to embrace all the frustrations that accompany that effort, the lows no longer feel so low, and a bit of excitement can be gleaned from even the most mundane aspects of the music business.

“I don’t even really know what the ultimate goal is anymore, and I kind of mean that in a positive way,” Childers says. “As long as we’re still mostly having fun, as long as we’re still proud of what we’re doing, and enjoying the time together, then you can’t discredit that.”

As Alex said, Hembree has paid its dues. As a smaller group, they’ll likely be paying them for quite some time. But so what? They can always take solace in one thing—that they get to chip away at it with each other.

“I think we’re lucky, the five of us, to be really good friends,” Childers says. “It’s nice working on something you care about with people you love.”