20The California Honeydrops have always made music that feels more comfortable moving than standing still. On “Lovin’ Made Easy (Dirtwire Dub Edit),” that instinct takes the Oakland roots-and-soul outfit somewhere new as Dirtwire dismantle and rebuild one of the Honeydrops’ standout 2026 singles through their own collision of dub, electronic production, Americana and global instrumentation.
Released August 14 through Tubtone Records, the new version begins with a song that was already built around feel. The California Honeydrops originally released “Lovin’ Made Easy” on February 13, a warm neo-soul track driven less by studio excess than by the loose, human groove that has defined the band for years. Dirtwire’s edit does not abandon that foundation. Instead, it pulls the song into a different environment, emphasizing space, bass, texture and rhythm while preserving the soulful character at its center.
It is a particularly fitting pairing because both groups have built identities around music that resists clean genre lines.
The California Honeydrops emerged from Oakland’s subway system before developing into a formidable touring band led by frontman Lech Wierzynski and percussionist Benjamin Malament. Their current lineup also includes Yanos “Johnny Bones” Lustig, Lorenzo Loera, Beaumont Beaullieu and Miles Blackwell, with an extended horn section frequently joining them live. Their sound can move from New Orleans R&B and vintage soul to blues, funk, gospel and roots music, and the band’s improvisational approach has become so central to its live identity that it performs without traditional set lists.
Dirtwire approach genre from an entirely different direction but arrive at a similarly open-ended result.
The trio of David Satori, Evan Fraser and Mark Reveley combine acoustic instruments with electronic production and sounds gathered from musical traditions around the world. Even Dirtwire’s own terminology reflects how difficult the project is to categorize, with the group describing its territory through phrases including “swamptronica,” “electro-twang” and “back-porch space cowboy blues.” Their catalog has incorporated blues, Americana, percussion traditions, banjo, violin, jaw harp, West African instruments and bass-heavy electronic production without treating those elements as separate worlds.
That makes a Dirtwire dub edit of The California Honeydrops less surprising than it might initially appear.
Dub has always relied on reimagining rather than simply remixing. Instruments disappear and reappear. Rhythms become more pronounced. Echo, repetition and negative space can become as important as the original melody. On “Lovin’ Made Easy,” that approach gives Dirtwire room to pull at the Honeydrops’ easygoing soul groove without erasing what made the original appealing.
The result functions as a meeting point between two different understandings of roots music. The Honeydrops draw heavily from American soul, R&B, blues and New Orleans traditions. Dirtwire take the concept of roots considerably farther outward, connecting American string-band sounds and blues vocabulary with instruments and ideas encountered through years of international travel.
What the two groups share is an emphasis on physical performance.
For all the electronic elements in Dirtwire’s music, theirs has never been a project confined to laptops and programmed tracks. Live instruments are fundamental to the sound. The same is true of the Honeydrops, whose career has been shaped by the chemistry, improvisation and audience interaction of live performance.
The remix also arrives in the middle of an especially active year for The California Honeydrops.
The original “Lovin’ Made Easy” arrived in February before the band followed with “365 Flavors” on March 27. The latter has become one of their strongest recent streaming releases, surpassing 2.7 million Spotify streams as of August. The number is particularly notable for a group whose reputation has historically been built as much through relentless touring and word of mouth as through digital singles.
Both songs follow the band’s 2025 album Redwood Highway, an eight-track collection written and produced primarily by Wierzynski and recorded across studios in Oakland and San Francisco. That record continued the Honeydrops’ preference for music that sounds lived-in rather than mechanically perfected, an approach that makes the leap into Dirtwire’s more production-driven world especially interesting.
The Honeydrops have also barely slowed down onstage. Their Wild and Free Tour carried them through the summer and concluded with an August 7 appearance at Levitate Backyard in Marshfield, Massachusetts. The band will return to the road this fall for the Sweet Like That Tour, with its official schedule showing the next major run beginning September 25 in Taos, New Mexico, before moving through Colorado and into a series of headline dates across the country.
Dirtwire remain active on the road as well, with their own schedule continuing through late summer and fall. That shared emphasis on live performance adds another layer to a remix that could easily have been treated as a purely studio exercise.
The California Honeydrops have spent their career showing how old musical languages can stay alive through improvisation and personality. Dirtwire have approached the same question from the opposite direction, taking traditional instruments and roots sounds and asking how they can function within contemporary electronic music.
It is still recognizably “Lovin’ Made Easy,” but the frame around the song has changed. The Honeydrops’ soul is intact. Dirtwire simply open up the walls around it, letting dub, bass and electronic texture turn a warm retro-soul single into something stranger, wider and built for an entirely different kind of dance floor.
“Lovin’ Made Easy (Dirtwire Dub Edit)” by The California Honeydrops and Dirtwire is out now through Tubtone Records.
