Marissa Kephart and Scott Yoshimura joined forces in 2021 to become Holding Hour, a Des Moines band that drifts between indie rock, dream pop and shoegaze. Kephart, the main songwriter, was a newcomer to releasing music while Yoshimura, an experienced producer, was already a veteran of the local music scene, having toured in bands like The Envy Corps and The Finesse.
Their partnership began when Yoshimura posted online to offer his engineering services to local musicians. Kephart, who had once hired Yoshimura to perform at her wedding, had picked up songwriting during the height of the pandemic and came to Yoshimura with “Meet Me Halfway,” a song that later became Holding Hour’s first single.
Their collaboration on “Meet Me Halfway” inspired the duo to start the band Elison, named after Kephart’s maiden surname, Cornelison. Kephart dove headfirst into online songwriting classes and Yoshimura into refining his production skills. They decided to change their name to Holding Hour, and the rest is history.
“I think I had an image in my head, or like, a sound in my head when I chose that name [Elison]. But when you let go and let the songs come through you, it sounded different than I think I thought I was going to be writing,” Kephart said. “To me, it just didn't feel like it was a great representation of the music that we were creating together. And finding a new name was quite a challenging part, but I think we both are happy with where it landed.”
Holding Hour consistently released singles over the past four years before compiling five of them into Parallel Lines, their debut EP, last year. At the show on Feb. 22, they released a deluxe full-length edition of Parallel Lines, adding five more singles to their CDs and limited-edition vinyl. Not only did their album release in February celebrate the launch of their first LP, it also marked the very first time Holding Hour performed in front of an audience. Kephart, once hindered by stage fright, valiantly led a full band version of Holding Hour through a thoughtfully orchestrated concert that Saturday night.
“I have incredible stage fright, and becoming a musician or starting a band wasn't necessarily part of the plan,” Kephart said. “It just kind of snowballed into this. [...] I had one song that I brought to Scott, and he's like, ‘Let's record it.’ From there, we're like, ‘Wait, this was fun. I'll try writing another song.’ And we did that. And then we're like, ‘Well, let's just keep going. Let's put out an EP.’ And then, now that we have this collection of songs, we've had a lot of people asking us to play, and it felt like the next kind of evolution and the next challenge for me personally was to get on stage and rip the Band-Aid off and do it.”
Three local musicians joined Kephart and Yoshimura on stage for their debut show: Tony Leo of SIRES and Extravision on guitar and keys, Jasey Rebarcek of Lady Revel on drums and Anna Kucera of Make-Believe Machines on bass.
“The musicians we are working with are all local musicians. They are people that we've known, either myself or Marissa has known for a little while,” Yoshimura said. “In the case of Jasey Rebarcek, she was actually one of the most recent additions. We had been looking for people to play with and trying to fill the drummer slot [...] I worked with Jasey on their recent release for Lady Revel, so I had them in studio. I was recording and producing that record and their bass player, Chase [...] had happened to mention to us, ‘Hey, did you know that Jasey is a drummer?’ I've only ever known her as a singer and a guitar player. I had no idea, so I just brought it up to her, and after thinking about it for a little bit, she decided to give it a shot. We got together, met up and jammed, and she's great. She's fantastic. Couldn't be more excited to have her on board with this project."
“Anna Kucera is also someone I've known for quite a few years, not well, but I am friends with some of her siblings, and I knew [that she went] to school for cello performance through her master's degree as well. She was back in Des Moines and working at Mars Cafe, which is right next to my recording studio, and so I'd see her all the time and just kind of talk a little bit here and there. It struck me as something that a cellist plays an instrument that is a similar scale length to a bass guitar. Of the stringed instruments that isn't a double bass, it's the closest. And so I asked her would she ever consider trying to play bass as well? She said she would be down for it. So over the course of like, six months or so, we just worked together and got her up to speed on the instruments; it’s quite a bit different from the cello. The tuning of the strings is drastically different, so it was a big transition and I wasn't throwing easy parts at her in that realm. A lot of what I played on bass guitar on this record, on our songs, it's fun, but it's a little challenging in some spots as well."
“Tony Leo is someone who actually reached out to us prior about playing bass. He's mainly a bass player, but he did mention that he also plays guitar in another band, and he has a band of his own. He plays some keys as well and that position was one more than we were looking for to fill out the time, so we reached out to him, and he agreed to give it a shot. And he's had to put a lot into it too, because I'm not, like I said, not throwing a lot of easy stuff at him, and a lot of times I've got him doing things on songs where he's playing guitar and then playing a synth line, back and forth and back and forth during the song, which can be challenging if you're less familiar with those instruments in particular. So he's put his work in, and it's really come together,” Yoshimura said.
The months of careful thought and preparation that went into Holding Hour’s first performance was clearly evident. The staging and lighting design not only corresponded with the band’s hazy shoegaze sound, it often synced up with the music and fed into the immersive experience. The dreamy transitions that Yoshimura arranged took concertgoers on a flowing journey through Holding Hour’s discography. It’s not every day that a band’s debut show fills up a venue like xBk with such a captivated audience. Holding Hour proved themselves worthy of their reputation for outstanding musicianship that night.
Kephart and Yoshimura were undoubtedly very intentional with the choices they made in the composition of Parallel Lines. Lyrically, Kephart said that she took inspiration from life for these songs.
“I pull from personal experience, because how else can you write? At least for me, I've put a lot of myself into these songs, but Scott has also helped shape them, and together creates a different kind of voice. So where the lyrics might come from me, the songs and the energy like come from our collaboration together,” Kephart said.
Yoshimura said that he sees Holding Hour’s sound as both a progression of his lengthy career in music and also a project all its own.
“It is, I would say, a progression in such that I am extremely involved on every level of the musicality of this endeavor. In other bands that I've been a part of, I haven't always had a hands-on approach as much with all of the different instruments or specifically parts in a lot of cases. In this scenario, I've been doing more large picture, big picture kind of arranging in a sense, and a lot of the musical endeavors I've been a part of prior to this, typically stopped at about the ‘I play the drums’ part, which I do, and I love it, but I have a broader musical mind than that as well,” Yoshimura said. “This has been a great exercise in personal strengths and weaknesses, discovery of what I can learn as I go, because there's so much to every project.”
Through both Holding Hour’s debut album and debut show, Kephart and Yoshimura have positioned themselves as strong musicians and creators. While the duo appears to be unsure about the future of their live performances, it’s clear that the Iowa music scene is greatly enhanced by the presence of this band, and hopefully more Holding Hour performances are yet to come.
