Feist / The Reminder (Deluxe Version) / 2007
Honey Honey
wistful, becalmed, quietly anxious
A short, hazy lyric about a lover lost somewhere between dream and sea, built almost entirely from repetition and drift rather than plot. It reads less like a story than a lulling, uncertain incantation about absence and doubt.
longing separation uncertainty nature imagery memory or dream logic
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an absent 'honey' while also narrating in third person about 'he' -- the shifting pronouns blur whether she's speaking to him directly or describing him from a distance, giving the voice a dreamlike, not-fully-reliable quality.
What happens
The song doesn't progress so much as circle: it opens with an image of a man drifting through trees and dreams, moves him out to sea while the speaker stays on land, then stalls entirely on the question of whether he'll return, before settling into wordless vocalizing and a final verse where the speaker herself sets out searching for him. The arc is less cause-and-effect than a slow shift from passive waiting to active searching.
How it's built
Two brief verses establish the central image and separation, a repeated conditional phrase builds tension without resolving it, a long wordless 'oh no' passage functions as an emotional plateau rather than a bridge, and a final verse returns to the sea imagery with the speaker now in motion. The near-identical verses bookend the song, giving it a circular, unresolved shape rather than a clear beginning-middle-end.
Craft
- repetition/incantation
- The doubled address and recurring phrases work like a chant, mimicking the stuck, looping quality of unresolved longing rather than advancing information.
- nautical and pastoral imagery
- Trees, flowers, and bees give way to sea and doldrums, mapping an emotional drift from grounded intimacy to open, directionless distance.
- pronoun instability
- Switching between direct address and third-person description of 'he' destabilizes who is being spoken to, reinforcing the sense of someone slipping out of reach.
- nonlexical vocalizing
- The wordless 'oh no' section replaces lyric content with pure sound, suggesting a grief or worry too diffuse for language.
Reading it
Read most straightforwardly, this is a song about a lover who has drifted away, physically or emotionally, leaving the speaker in suspended uncertainty about reunion; the nautical 'doldrums' becomes a literal and figurative image of being stalled. An alternative reading treats the whole song as an internal, half-dreamed narrative -- the trees, sea, and bees not a real geography but the speaker's own anxious imagination working through the fear of abandonment, with the final verse's search less a literal journey than a metaphor for continuing to hope.
Context
'Honey Honey' appeared on the deluxe edition of The Reminder, Feist's 2007 breakthrough album, and has a lighter, more fragmentary feel than the album's more fleshed-out singles, consistent with its status as a bonus or interstitial track rather than a centerpiece.
Listen for
- how the melody itself seems to drift and stall, mirroring the 'doldrums' imagery
- the shift from passive waiting to active searching between the first and last verse
- the wordless vocal section standing in for words the lyric doesn't supply
- the way pronouns slide between direct address and third-person distance
About Feist
Leslie Feist, known mononymously as Feist, is a Canadian indie pop singer and songwriter, performing both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene.
b. 1976 / Canada
Full biography and catalogue