With hundreds of miles between members, indie pop band A Healthy Alternative for Better Living is working on new music and looking to grow their audience long distance.
The band, known to fans affectionately as HAFBL, is split between New York, Bloomington and Columbus, Indiana.
The group has three members: Alex Kessler, 19, the bassist, lead vocalist, pianist and acoustic guitarist; Isaiah Smith, 19, the lead/electric guitarist; and Nathaniel Reed, 21, the drummer and backup vocalist. Reed is in Bloomington, Smith is in Columbus and Kessler is in New York.
The band has only been together for a short time, but Kessler and Smith were writing music together long before their official branding.
“Isaiah and I wrote ‘Extract’ for fun, that was really where it started,” Kessler said.
Kessler and Smith asked Reed to play drums for HAFBL, and Reed said he accepted without hesitation despite the drums not being his main instrument.
“I never considered myself a drummer,” Reed said. “I’m a guitar player first, but I’ve been playing drums for ten years.”
When Kessler and Smith asked him to play drums for HAFBL, Reed said he accepted without hesitation. He’d been friends with them for a long time, and he wanted to make music with them regardless of what instrument he was playing.
The other songs, he said, just fell together.
Shortly after the release of their debut EP, “Hafbl,” in August 2018, Kessler moved to New York for college.
“You can’t really write a song together when you’ve got a member in a different state, so it’s been more of each of us writing stuff individually,” Reed said.
None of the members want to break up the band, they said. A new LP is in the works and they’ve worked hard over the past year to improve communication in order to make it happen.
“It’s a big stress on the band, but we make it work,” Kessler said.
Social media has been a big help on this front, Kessler said. The members are able to send parts back and forth, and Kessler runs Twitter, Instagram and Reddit accounts for the band to help with advertising. Reed gives these accounts a great deal of credit for the band’s fanbase.
“We could make the world’s best album, and no one would hear it if we didn’t post about it,” he said.
Social media is also how HAFBL met Devin Stitz, who runs Beach Cats Records in St. Louis. The group agreed to sign to the label a short time after the release of their EP. After signing to the label, their audience began to grow—their monthly Spotify listens went from around 200 to over 2,000.
Despite that its musical projects remain on hold due to the distance between them, HAFBL’s following continues to grow.
While HAFBL's members said they are thrilled about the attention that the band is getting, they don’t want to lose sight of their carefree approach to music.
“The good news is we are still just having fun with it,” Smith said. “It’s not like we’re relying on making a living out of it. When we do get together, songs form just like they used to. It’s really just about enjoying it all.”
With this attitude, the band is able to work through the issues they have with distance and find the fun in their music, they say. In short, Reed said, the important thing isn’t the band as a whole but the members that make it up.
“Playing music with your best friends is way better,” he said.
