Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessie & Niki Bobenmoyer.
Jessie & Niki, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Hail Your Highness was created by myself (Jessie) and my sister (Niki) over a decade ago. We grew up playing music, so it’s always been a huge part of our lives. We played in other bands that we created with our friends as teenagers and were brought up heavily in music ministry as kids in the church giving us an innate ability to tap into controlling the atmosphere of a room with music. When the time came for us to find our own truths, we stepped outside that realm and discovered a completely new side to ourselves and our music. Initially, we started the band just the two of us, and the lineup has seen several different incarnations of Hail Your Highness over the years, but in 2016 we decided to go back to our roots as a 2 piece with the encouragement of some close friends and have created some of the best music we’ve ever written and recorded as a 2 piece since then. Also in 2016, we were introduced to an engineer out of Indianapolis, Brian “Bone” Thorburn head of Threshold Studio Productions as well as our manager Justin Wheeler at Clean Cut Entertainment, and it completely changed the trajectory of our band ever since.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s definitely been a fight since the beginning. We’ve been a DIY independent band from the start and are a small team of 3 which supplies a lot of challenges but has made us incredibly adaptable over the years. Going through so many member changes in our early phase as a band felt like a constant setback, but now we can see it more as a setup for success looking back. We wouldn’t have it any other way at this point, being a 2 piece. As women in the music industry, we’ve had to fight for everything. Respect, autonomy in our music, basic privacy, shows we knew we were good enough to be on, etc. Not only did we have to be good at what we do, we had to excel to be accepted, respected, and taken seriously as musicians and not just a gimmick or “good for girls.” Thankfully, we haven’t heard that phrase in a while and we hope the groundwork that we continue to lay as women in this industry alongside of the decades-long work before us will help future women starting bands and make it easier for them to share their voices. It feels like we’re still fighting against a lot of gatekeeping these days which gets incredibly frustrating knowing our worth and where we should be with talents. Knowing our worth has been a huge turning point for us and something we hold onto dearly these days. We’ve also never been an easy genre peg for people which starting out always seemed like a hindrance. No one ever knew what to do with us. Now, it seems to be a lot more widely acceptable to not be a genre-specific band.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
4 years ago, we released a song called “Duality” that was picked up by KERRANG! for debut and review. They said some lovely, amazing things about the song and our band, but the biggest thing that stuck out to us was the genre they categorized us as, dream rock. Literally, for 10 years we didn’t know what to call the music we made and would always just tell people, “You have to hear it,” and it would turn into an awkward conversation of us trying to explain and list off bands or genres that would resonate and make sense to whomever we were talking to. When KERRANG! dropped the dream rock label, it all made sense to us. We finally had something to categorize as our own and our genre finally made sense. “Duality” was truly a huge turning point in our journey of musical fusion. We grew up listening to a lot of hardcore/screamo bands, but over the years have developed a love for a lot of international music from K-pop to prog rock, shoegaze, and indie bands. Since then, we’ve tapped into the dreamiest dream rock we can create, literally taking the listener on journeys through our dreams and hopefully theirs too. We excel at fusing genres into our own sound. I think that’s one of our biggest strengths as well as our melody and harmony creations. Being sisters, we have an unspoken language between the two of us and we’re able to hone in on things on a different level than most bands. I think anyone who’s in a band with a sibling can understand that connection and I think that’s what made it hard for us to have other members.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Our biggest point of collaboration and support is our Patreon. Aside from buying music, that is the best way to directly support our band and even collaborate with as songwriters. It’s a direct line of contact to us, no middleman, and the people apart of our community are lovely. http://patreon.com/hailyourhighness
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/hyhband
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hyhband/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hailyourhighness
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/HYHband
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/EpiLPS
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/hailyourhighness
- Other: http://hailyourhighness.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Chelsea Whitaker Photography
Joshua Lohrman
