The Handyband Collective Cleans Up the Sound of Home Maintenance: Group of musicians takes odd jobs to the next level – Music

Hiring musicians for his collective of handy people was an obvious decision for True Lawton. Not only are they his community, but the potential to supplement musicians’ spotty pay and support their odd hours clicked immediately. Now, as founder and in-house contractor for the Handyband, Lawton sees the skills that musicianship teaches as essential to the kind of maintenance he strives to provide.

“Everybody who is a musician is a performer. If a handy person is not a performer, they are, in general, a bad person [to have in] your home,” he says.

A result of his knack for hustling and problem solving, Lawton cooked up the Handyband Collective on the fly in response to a COVID-era furlough from his high-capacity concert producer job. After finishing a full-scale remodel with a motley crew of his former bandmates from the metal group Diesel & Dixie and stagehands from his years at Black Fret (now Sonic Guild), Lawton spotted a kink in the handyman management system. He put his skills as a musician and event coordinator to the task.

“The background of this idea is that there is a bigger problem with contractor management,” he says. ”There is such a problem with all of that in the flow, the timing, the communication – it all has problems.”

Patching holes on both sides of the customer service interaction is the collective’s central mission. Lawton puts it in musical terms: The audience’s expectations and the musician’s expectations both need to be clear before the show can begin.

As a rule, the collective does not issue an estimate until they’re as certain as can be about what a job needs. This requires a patience and level of express communication that benefits from people who know how to set up a show and deliver an audience a good time.

“Almost all handyman work is just figuring out what’s going on,” Lawton explains. “There’s no manual. You can figure out how to build stuff from scratch. You can go back and figure out how they used to build things, but everything in between is a lot of problem solving and discovery.”

Handyman work is improvisational and inherently context specific, even in its most mundane forms. Analogies to musicianship are all over the place.

Chelsea Beach started at the Handyband Collective doing drywall and painting. The singer-songwriter is now dipping her toes into carpentry, through the collective’s apprenticeship structure, while playing open mic gigs around town.

“The music industry is kind of financially not the best,” she laughs. “Companies like Live Nation [and] Ticketmaster really kill that.”

Working for Handyband, Beach says, “I can choose my own schedule, so I make sure that I have time for [music and creative pursuits] and continue my passion and keep that alive.”