According to Confucious, if you choose a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life. Marc Labelle has clearly taken that piece of wisdom to heart. Labelle is the vocalist for the hard rock band Dirty Honey – a band who in 2019 became the only unsigned band ever to be #1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart with their song “When I’m Gone.” Dirty Honey is releasing their self-titled full-length debut album on April 23rd. The first single of the album, “California Dreamin’,” is already getting rave reviews, with Rolling Stone saying the song has “towering hooks,” “smoking guitar solos” and “massive riffs.”
In order to achieve this success, Labelle definitely needed to do what from the outside looked like a lot of work. Labelle had to move to Los Angeles without a job, a home or a band. He needed to live out of his car and eventually on friends’ porches. And he and his Dirty Honey bandmates have achieved their success thus far without the support of a label, and during a time when live music has been almost entirely shut down by the pandemic. But during our conversation for The Hardcore Humanism Podcast, you almost get the sense that none of this seemed particularly burdensome for Labelle. And as he spoke, the reason became clear. For Labelle, nothing really feels like work as long as he can pursue his purpose, which is his love and passion for music.
Unlike many musicians who have aspired to rock stardom since birth, Labelle describes his path as starting a bit later in his life. As an adult he moved to Italy and was hosting an open mic night at a bar. And after the club owner heard him sing, Labelle was soon recruited to play nightly. It was then that he realized that not only did he love playing music, but also that it might be a career for him.
“I just remember, this Italian guy coming up to me and saying, ‘You will work for me now. You’re an amazing singer’… And anytime you can go abroad and start to earn a living, doing anything, really, you know that’s a big step,” Labelle told me. “I was playing for small audiences every night just playing acoustic guitar and singing covers, but I knew I loved it. … And it was shortly after that experience living abroad that I just decided I’m going to move out west and get home and take a shot at LA, which didn’t go as planned – it didn’t go as well as I wanted it to, as fast as I wanted it to.”
Labelle was briefly able to crash at a spare bedroom of a friend of a friend, and then at a girlfriend’s house. But soon he found himself living out of his car or on friends’ porches. And yet Labelle found a routine that allowed him to make this arrangement work – including finding time to play shows. He described his daily routine as sleeping in his car, working out and showering at a gym, working a low paying job, booking and playing shows. Labelle refers to this time as his “living like a cockroach.” And yet while many people might find that label as representing the worst time in their lives, because Labelle was doing what he loved, he described it as “honestly one of the better times in my life.”
To be sure, while Labelle was doing what he needed to do in order to pursue his music, he was not necessarily giving it his “all,” particularly when it came to songwriting. But Labelle credits this time in his life as when he became a stronger singer as a result of playing consistent shows.
“Ultimately, everything comes down to the music. Is the music good enough for people to respond to? And I didn’t really understand that. You move out here and you think, ‘Oh, if I get the right manager, if I get the right booking agent, if I meet the right people, then the dominoes will fall’ when, really, it’s all about the work. Is your art good enough?” he said. “…I was trying to book gigs and make a couple 100 bucks here and there playing club gigs, but we’d be playing covers. And what I did take from that, though, is I became a much better singer. Singing four hours a night, Thursday, Friday, Saturday – there is some plus to all that. But thinking back I probably should have been working on the music a little more.”
According to Labelle, Dirty Honey was playing shows that consisted mostly of cover songs until drummer Corey Coverstone joined. Soon the band recognized that their original songs were holding their own in a set that included covers. “We started to take stock in the fact that we would play original songs sandwiched between like Zeppelin and Aerosmith and AC/DC. And people would come up to us afterwards and be like, ‘I want to hear an original.’ And we’d be like, ‘Oh, you just did.’ So, we kind of knew we were doing something right if these songs were holding up in the middle of all these other songs by great artists…,” Labelle explained. “But then, really the last domino to fall was when we got Cory involved and he wanted to be in an original project. And that sort of really set everything in motion to like, okay, we’re going to start writing all the time to put these songs together.”
In the absence of having a proper album, Labelle thought that Dirty Honey could spread the word by making its own videos. “I fought with the guys about it for like a week. I said, ‘Hey, we have an opportunity. Let’s go into Capitol Records, we’ll shoot some original videos to put out on to the internet so that people have something to see.’ Give me some sort of ammo to reach out to people with, because I really believed in the music we were making,” he described. “You know, we didn’t have any recordings. We didn’t have anything. So, I said, ‘We need just give me something to show people so I can get some traction going.’ And that’s what we did. And really that was when everything started to change.”
Dirty Honey is not signed to a record label. So, in order to conduct the business of the band, they had to construct a team around them. Looking back, Labelle feels that there was one guiding principle that determined who he would work with. And it was the same principle that has driven him to be able to “live like a cockroach” en route to pursuing his dream. The people in and around the band needed to have an uncompromised passion for Dirty Honey’s music. “It all stems from passion … That’s the band, that’s the business people, your manager, your agent. If they’re not genuinely passionate about what’s going on, musically, you know, you’re only doing yourself a disservice being associated with those people. It can only go so far, just based on relationships,” he said. “Because it’s a much different conversation if a manager says, ‘Hey, do me a favor, play this record,’ … versus ‘I’m about to blow your mind, this is the best thing I’ve heard in f*cking 10 years of rock ‘n’ roll.’ It’s just coming from a genuine place of passion. And word of mouth is, as we know, is for sure the most powerful form of marketing. And if somebody is actually excited about something, it’s going to go the distance. So, I would say passion is definitely the most crucial elements of all of this, you know, on every level: creatively, business, everything.”
