The Honey Badgers: A Journey Through Love and Grief in Music

Folk Americana duo The Honey Badgers build their music around something simple but powerful: two voices in close harmony, telling stories about love, loss, and finding your way in the world.

Erin Magnin sings and plays fiddle. Michael Natrin sings, plays guitar, and adds harmonica. Their songs often feel intimate and reflective, shaped by travel, relationships, and the quiet moments in between.

But the duo didn’t set out to form a band. In fact, it happened almost by accident.

“We were performing for a showcase and I asked Erin to come and play fiddle with me,” Natrin said. “The harmonies blended so magically and we just couldn’t stop performing.”

That spur-of-the-moment collaboration has turned into a long musical partnership. More than 15 years later, they’re still writing, touring, and refining the sound they discovered that night.

For Magnin, that first performance felt both exciting and nerve-racking.

“I was very nervous,” she said. “I had never performed in that capacity before. I’d only done choirs or orchestras. And being up there just with Michael and improvising and doing something so intimate and vulnerable was a little bit scary.”

Still, something about the moment stuck.

“I definitely got hooked from that first moment,” Magnin said, adding with a laugh that there may have been another factor: “We also secretly thought each other were pretty cute.”

Writing songs together

For years, the duo wrote separately, bringing nearly finished songs to each other to arrange and harmonize.

“But recently,” Magnin said, “we’ve managed to find ways to write similarly, and so we’ve been writing together a lot more.”

Now the process often starts with something small — a fragment of an idea or a melody. Natrin says that collaborative approach has also made their songwriting more personal.

“Most of the time I think my writing is more abstract and I haven’t shared a ton of personal stuff,” he said. “But when we’re writing together, we’ve been sharing a lot of stories of our travels, stories of grief, stories of love.”

Working together, he said, allows them to arrive somewhere neither might reach on their own.

“We’re able to come up with something that we couldn’t come up with on our own probably.”

Turning grief into music

Those shared experiences shape their latest album, The Earth Turns and So Do We, a record that reflects on life’s cycles — love, loss, and the slow process of healing.

The album came together after a difficult period that included personal losses and the isolation of the pandemic.

“That record was like therapy,” Magnin said. “We did not set out to write a grief album,” she said. “But it is what was in us at the time.”

The songs became a way to process what they were going through.

“Most of those songs were reflecting on something that we were struggling with for the past couple of years,” Magnin said. “And writing through that really helped us to process the grief and move — not really past it — but move through it in a way that it didn’t have to hold us down anymore.”

Finding connection on the road

Touring, they say, has also shaped their music in unexpected ways.

For Magnin, traveling from town to town creates a different kind of community.

“The community building on the road is incredible,” she said. “It feels more like the in-person, much nicer version of the internet. Like there’s just these tendrils going through everywhere.”

Playing in different cities has also revealed something surprising: people connect with the same emotions no matter where they are.

“The cool thing about touring is everyone everywhere is a little bit the same,” she said.

That connection often becomes most visible after the music ends.

“We get up on stage and we’re sharing something intimate or vulnerable,” Magnin said. “And then people in the audience come up to us afterwards and they share their stories. It seems to me that they’re healing while we’re singing and then we’re healing back.”

Image: The Honey Badgers will perform at The Cooperage Project on April 12. (The Honey Badgers)