Photograph by Matt Kelly/Half Way Home

Half Way Home Crew - Trevor, Kayleigh, Nick, Shane, Matt

The story of Half Way Home begins in a modest house in Solana Beach: a two-bedroom, stand-alone casita situated a short distance downhill from the property’s main home. Trevor LeVieux was living in that little house with his Miss New Buddha bandmate Shane Moylan, circa 2017. “We were recording our album there,” Moylan explains. “That’s when the idea kind of started to form. Matt [Kelly], the main camera guy, was a very close friend as well; he was helping document a lot of things. The house became the place we always were, and we kept thinking of more and more things to do there. It kind of culminated in Half Way Home.”

Even though the team has released a handful of physical albums and dabbled in record distribution, the main focus of Half Way Home, ever since its 2018 inception, has been taping in-studio sessions that can be viewed on its YouTube channel. They coordinate with touring acts to squeeze them in for sessions when they’re gigging in town, and have hosted numerous local artists as well. The list of Southern California talent that has played there includes ferocious hardcore acts such as INUS, Therapy, and Deaf Club, and also the bluegrass duo Blind Mountain Holler, hip-hop-jazz project Parker Meridien, and fun indie outfits like The Havnauts and Shades McCool. And that’s just a sampling.

Half Way Home isn’t lighting the internet on fire — their most viewed clips are two 2019 Weatherbox songs that have over 20K views each — but they are providing San Diego with a consistent resource for quality live video recordings of both local and national acts. They even managed to keep the boat afloat during the covid shutdown, when most music content on YouTube turned into remotely taped online collaborations.

Half Way Home - Deaf Club Session

Photo by Aaron Thornhill

“We had a ton of fun during covid actually, which is kind of strange,” says Kayleigh Lane, a newer member of the Half Way Home family. “We had fun just making sure everyone was safe, so we kind of tweaked our videos. Instead of the bands all being in one room, we had to separate everybody, and obviously we all wore masks. It was a cool dynamic and kind of a challenge for both us and the bands to separate everybody. Some would be outside. Some would be in the main room. Some would be on the bridge in the front.”

Moylan makes note of his Miss New Buddha bandmate LeVieux, who engineers all the sessions. “Trevor’s so good at making things stretch out as far as he did with cables. He was stringing pedals together to get people downstairs. It was born out of necessity, but it actually became something that I would assume we probably utilized to the fullest.”

While Half Way Home continues to prioritize the in-studio sessions, they’ve been experimenting with livestreaming events held elsewhere. Their first stab at this was a June 2020 set by Ohcult at Tower Bar. “That was a little rough, because Tower Bar is really dark,” says Moylan. “It was a dry run. We had to go back to the drawing board after that and make sure we had everything right.” That lead to a July 2021 gig at Soda Bar featuring headliners Mrs. Magician. Lane says that she and her brother Nick worked two cameras in the room and were aided by a third on a tripod that served to get a big-picture view from the back. The result was a big improvement. “I was in New York at the time, watching,” says Moylan, “and I was like, ‘This looks great.’ Everything was running great. I could not say the same thing about the first livestream.”

Half Way Home is currently scheduling about three bands a month for sessions. This gives them a little more wiggle room when it comes to squeezing in touring bands that decide to do a session at the last minute. They’re also hoping to do more livestreams, and are planning on releasing a solo album from Mrs. Magician singer Jacob Turnbloom next Halloween. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ll have to get ‘picky’ when we start to get busy,” Moylan says. “I guess, with more touring bands coming back, we can eventually fit a local band in, but it gets a little harder when we have such a small amount of time during which a touring band will be here. We have only so much time in a week to live a normal life and also do this thing on the side. We want to showcase it all.”