Wild Honey Pie Pizza Party with Lucius Makes the Case for Intimate Music

There is a detail from the Wild Honey Pie Pizza Party with Lucius on 17 September that captures the whole project rather neatly: the stage at The Eden in Santa Monica was 18 inches off the ground. For the 150 people gathered that Thursday evening, there was no elevation to hide behind, no distance to aestheticise. The band was simply there, at eye level, as close as a friend across a kitchen table.

That proximity was the point. Presented by Verizon with SPIN, the evening brought together Lucius and Brooklyn pizza institution Paulie Gee alongside Eden chef Gabi Chappel for something that resisted easy categorisation. Guests ate pizza, sat around a fire pit, met strangers, and eventually turned their attention to a stripped-down 30-minute Lucius set accompanied by a string trio. For some in attendance, it was enough to prompt tears. The following night, the same band played alongside Orville Peck in front of more than 17,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl. The contrast was, by design, enormous.

The Wild Honey Pie Pizza Party and the Question of Scale

Eric Weiner, founder of The Wild Honey Pie, has spent more than a decade testing the boundaries of what a music event can reasonably be. The New York-based creative studio has staged dinner parties, summer camps and ski weekends (including a 2024 trip featuring Local Natives, Gus Dapperton and Rubblebucket) and its gatherings have always been calibrated around a particular idea: that a smaller room, treated with care, can forge a connection between artist and listener that a conventional arena show cannot replicate.

The Wild Honey Pie’s dinner parties typically bring together 50 to 80 people. Its Pizza Parties accommodate between 100 and 150. Even its larger historical events have rarely exceeded a few hundred guests. Weiner is plain about what he thinks happens when you stretch that number too far. ‘Calling a 5,000-person concert “intimate” stretches the definition,’ the report of his thinking makes clear. What he is after is something more precise: enough people to generate a room’s worth of energy, few enough that the musicians’ faces are visible from anywhere you stand.

Hundreds entered the lottery and RSVP process to attend September’s event; a queue eventually wound around the block. Those who made it inside found the kind of considered detail that has become something of a Wild Honey Pie signature: handmade mugs with telephone-cord handles created with Verizon, marinara pizza pennants from Oxford Pennant, limited-edition stickers, Shure friendship bracelets, and a hand-painted red rotary phone on which guests could leave personal messages for the band. A tomato-and-ginger vegan cookie was inspired by the ingredients in Mimikai’s bug spray. The menu was entirely vegetarian, with vegan and gluten-free options available throughout.

An Analogue Argument in a Streaming Age

The Wild Honey Pie’s relationship with Lucius stretches back to 2011, when the band hosted the company’s Honey I’m Home sessions. Lucius later performed at some of the first Beehive events. The Pizza Party at The Eden, then, was less an introduction than a homecoming, a chance for two collaborators to revisit the kind of setting where they first found each other.

Weiner’s language about what The Wild Honey Pie is trying to do has a consistent texture. ‘We’re trying to create an environment where everyone in that room is going to be listening to Lucius for the rest of their lives,’ he says. The performances are filmed as live sessions, with the possibility of eventual release as live albums. The company purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of Lucius records, had them signed by the band and gave them away alongside signed posters. Physical objects, food, hand-stitched stage banners, posters made by real artists: these are not incidental flourishes but a deliberate counter-argument to the increasingly algorithmic shape of the music economy.

‘In the age of AI, we’re the people doing everything from scratch,’ Weiner says. ‘It’s all handmade.’

The company has also restructured its events as fundraisers, with ticket proceeds donated to nonprofit organisations. Since launching that programme, The Wild Honey Pie says it has donated more than $65,000 to charities. Thursday’s event benefited Food & Water Watch, which campaigns for safe food, clean water and a livable climate. Because admission came through lottery and RSVP rather than conventional ticket sales, the evening also included a charity auction and a suggested $100 donation; the final amount raised was still being calculated after the event closed.

Weiner says he is planning the return of larger experiences (gatherings of around 500 people) while continuing to develop the smaller formats. A new website is also in development, intended to bring together recordings, articles, podcasts and artist features, with technology designed to give musicians more ways to document the stories behind their records: track-by-track commentary, behind-the-scenes photographs, works-in-progress. The aim, as Weiner frames it, is to help people fall in love with artists and albums rather than simply songs. For the 150 people at The Eden on 17 September, that argument was already won.