Non-Profit News

By Janet Gramza

Fourteen years after it went viral, google “honey badgers” and your first result will be the famous “Honey Badger Don’t Care” video that went viral in 2011.

But add the word “The” and you’ll find The Honey Badgers, a folk duo who jokingly chose the name to enter a songwriting contest that summer, discovered they made beautiful music together, fell in love and went on to quit their day jobs to become full-time musicians.

Now married, guitarist Michael Natrin and violinist Erin Magnin write and sing songs full of lyrical lessons, humor and harmonies they’ve honed over 15 years.

Last year, they won Best Emerging Artists at the Susquehanna (Pa.) Folk Festival and released a new album, “The Earth Turns and So Do We,” that placed 15^th on the Folk International Association Folk Radio Chart.

The Delaware-based duo will be in Oswego on Saturday (May 10) to headline the Oswego Music Hall’s Season Finale, a mini music fest that also includes a new artist showcase of local talent, refreshments and a sunset champagne toast.

The Oswego Music Hall, aka the non-profit Ontario Center for the Performing Arts, is celebrating 40 years since its 1975 founding. The season finale caps a series of concerts and educational events from September through May that bring folk and Americana artists from around the world to hall on the Lake Ontario shore.

Oswego Music Hall Artistic Director Tom Lambert said he saw The Honey Badgers perform at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance music conference in Maine last November and instantly wanted to bring them to Central New York.

“We were immediately drawn in with their heartfelt lyrics, fun stage presence and excellent harmonies,” Lambert said. “They were definitely one of the most popular bands at the conference.”

The Music Hall, a 200-seat venue with café seating and a coffee house ambiance, has a devoted corps of volunteers who pitch in to make shows a community experience. Refreshments are home-made and low-priced ($1 popcorn!), faces are friendly and tickets, which vary in price depending on the artist, are considerably less than what most venues charge.

Saturday’s event runs 6 to 10 p.m. and is free for members and $15 for non-members. An optional dinner is $10 and starts at 6 accompanied by music from rising local artists. Find details at oswegomusichall.org/

At 8 p.m., there’s a champagne toast as the sun sets over Lake Ontario, followed by dessert and The Honey Badgers concert.

“The sunset toast is a long-standing tradition as a way to celebrate another year of bringing live music and original singer-songwriters to our community,” Lambert said. “We get a great view of the sunset from the windows facing the lake this time of year.”

Honey Badger singer and fiddler Erin Magnin said venues like the Music Hall are the duo’s favorite performance spaces.

“The listening room/coffee house vibe is our preferred vibe,” she said. “We started out playing a lot of breweries and bars, which have a lot of energy but people aren’t really listening. As we began writing songs that are more about the lyrics and the stories behind them, we find we really thrive in venues where people come to sit and listen.”

Magnin and Natrin hail from Newark, Delaware, where both went to college, Magnin for music and Natrin for electrical engineering. By their senior year, they were musical “acquaintances” -- she a Classically trained soprano who played violin since childhood and he an acoustic guitarist and folk singer-songwriter who won the University of Delaware’s Battle of the Bands and a Delaware’s Got Talent competition in 2011.

That summer, Natrin decided to enter the Delaware Friends of Folk Music’s Folk Hero contest and asked Magnin to join him.

“He thought adding a fiddle would sound more folky, so he asked me to try something totally different and it ended up being pretty fun,” she said. “We won the first round and moved forward, and it all started happening from there.”

The contest was in July, six months after “Honey Badger Don’t Care” became an overnight phenomenon. Magnin said they practiced for two weeks but never thought about a name until they were in line to sign up.

“They said, ‘What’s your name?’ and we said, ‘Ha, ha! We’ll be The Honey Badgers,’ because, to our 22-year-old minds, that was hilarious,” Magnin said. “Then we made it to the final round and became The Honey Badgers forevermore.”

Magnin said they started falling in love while performing together and their relationship and songwriting partnership grew from there.

“At first we sort of tried to ignore what was happening in the love department,” she said. “The music was fun and we were having fun together, and then we realized something else was happening.”

“It’s a big challenge to be romantic partners and work together, but it’s also really wonderful,” she added. “Sometimes I wonder how people do this without being in an intimate relationship with your bandmate.”

At first they performed Natrin’s original songs with Magnin’s vocal and fiddle embellishments, then began writing together. They made two EPs and toured regionally while keeping their full-time jobs, Natrin as an engineer specializing in sustainable energy and Magnin with the Delaware Department of State.

In 2016, Magnin quit her job to start a voice training business and found doing music full-time fueled her creativity. By 2019, Natrin joined her, trading an in-demand career and “a significant amount of future income for a unique lifestyle that is vastly more fulfilling,” he said.

That year they recorded their first full-length album, “Meet Me,” with songs they co-wrote about “big dreams and taking the first step into them, and hope and optimism and how wonderful things could be,” Magnin said.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, plunging them into the isolation and loss that so many others experienced. Magnin’s grandmother was among the first Covid deaths. They battled grief with music, and tapped Natrin’s engineering skills to livestream concerts, forging new connections with listeners, Magnin said.

“People were so eager for music and connection that, even if it was online, it was so neat to be able to provide that,” she said. “As songwriters, we had a lot more stillness and room for introspection. There was a lot of working through grief and thinking about mortality.”

The cycle of life, the passing of seasons, the sweetness of summer, its fleeting fireflies – these are the themes of some stirringly beautiful songs on their new album, which reflect their maturation as musicians embarking on their first tour outside the East Coast, Magnin said.

“It’s just a clink of the glass, a roll of dice,” they sing in “On My Grave.”

As they’ve improved their songwriting and stage presence, Magnin said they’ve contemplated changing their name – “for SEO purposes (to be first in online searches) and because honey badgers are mean and we try not to be!”

But like the honey badger, the name perseveres. “All of our friends are adamant that we have to keep it,” she said.