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Calgary Folk Music Festival
Prince's Island Park
Thursday, July 22 - Sunday, July 25

More in: Folk / Country

Inside a boxy, brown-and-white 1973 Winnebago is the home of Aaron Meyer, a.k.a. Honeybear. This is where he lives, travels and makes hauntingly beautiful experimental folk music.

Next to a kennel for his canine companion, Jasper, the vintage vehicle is packed with little more than a guitar, ukulele, effects pedals and Tascam eight-track recorder. Nonetheless, the soft-spoken nomad recently hit the highway from California to return to his on-and-off homebase of Calgary for a series of performances at this year’s iteration of the folk fest.

“I’m not sure of the distance I’ve driven so far because the odometer’s broken,” Meyer says. “About 3,000 miles, I think. I picked up the Winnebago a little south of Culver City in the Inland Empire. From there, I basically just went up the I-5, except for a detour out to the coast to play Santa Cruz. Up to Bellingham, down to Seattle, then through Washington and Idaho to Calgary. I had to skirt around the mountains because this thing can’t handle the drive from Vancouver to here.”

Meyer’s first contact with the Calgary musical community came when now defunct orchestral pop troupe The Consonant C passed through California several years ago. This inspired him to follow the band back to Alberta, and has since resulted in plenty of fruitful collaborations, including a recently released album-book team-up with local visual artist Heather Smith, performances and recordings with Kris Ellestad, Clea Foofat, Azeda Booth and Naomi Burkhart and a European tour as a member of Woodpigeon.

“I played music a little bit when I was 17, but I was a very dramatic teenager,” Meyer says. “Eventually, I decided I sucked and that it was terrible. Because I didn’t sound as good as the bands I was listening to, I just quit. However, after meeting the Consonant C, I bought a ukulele, wrote two songs and played them for the band. I wrote the rest on my first trip to Calgary.”

After the folk fest wraps up, Meyer’s wanderlust will best him once again, and he next plans to trek the Winnebago to Bellingham, Washington. All bodes well if he can avoid a previous dilemma with his pup.

“One time in northern California, we were walking and I guess he must have eaten something from the ground,” Meyer says. “He got really sick and I had to take him to a vet in Oregon. It ended up costing me half my food money to get him well again. Just because that little shit ate a mushroom.”