It takes an odd set of ingredients to make a HNRY FLWR, but sometimes you need the strangest things to produce something that truly stands out in a world that’s seen just about everything.
The man behind the project, David Van Witt, spent much of his childhood in a meditation commune – or cult, depending on who you ask. Seeking a fresh start, Van Witt’s mother moved him and his brother to the spiritual community in rural Iowa, where they lived in a network of trailer homes inhabited by crystal-carrying hippie idealists. The family lived there until his mother, shaken by a near-death experience, decided to leave the commune and take the 12-year-old Van Witt and his brother Northeast.
It wasn’t the worst childhood. The worst part about it was actually leaving.
“I think life just got harder when we left it because I was kind of leaving a bubble,” Van Witt explains.
Part of his psyche, unsurprisingly, still remains there. The spirituality gained from his childhood commune experience is the biggest philosophical influence on the eclectic rock that is HNRY FLWR.
For the better part of a decade, Van Witt and his band have been tearing up Brooklyn’s music scene, collecting a rotating lineup of about 30 of some of the borough’s finest musicians.
“It’s sort of like a running joke in Brooklyn [that] every musician there has been in my band,” Van Witt says.
The singer-guitarist recently solidified a six-member lineup he calls “The Infinite Void.” He’ll bring two of them – Luc Swift on guitar, Melanie Drew Chambers on keyboard – along to SXSW, which he’s played a handful of times in the past.
“It always feels like home,” Van Witt says of the festival. “All these other bands from New York are there, so I run into people I don’t even run into here in New York.”
HNRY FLWR’s impassioned preaching fits right in among the singular musical acts of SXSW. Their songs inspire the type of zen you’d expect from a trailer park sunset meditation. With a sound somewhere between melodic folk rock and experimental funk, and a vocal persona between Lou Reed and Ram Dass, the band’s 2023 debut album, Visions of the Daytime Moon, was a standout display of Van Witt’s exceptional voice.
“I thought about my mom/ Waking up from a clairvoyance/ When I wouldn’t come home/ I was chasing the crow/ A sacred omen,” he proclaims in opener “The Mystery,” a spirited track that includes both a tasteful flute solo and unconfined Auto-Tune.
Like Robert Zimmerman’s metamorphosis into Bob Dylan and David Robert Jones’ reinvention into David Bowie, Van Witt has come to embody his vowelless musical persona.
“I think it’s about taking off my mask as David Van Witt and all the baggage that comes with that,” he says. “There’s something powerful in taking ownership of your identity in that way.”
When the Chronicle phoned him late last month, Van Witt was at work on the next HNRY FLWR album. Playing his new music at SXSW, he hopes, will be just as far out as his origin story.
“When you can feel the [audience] sort of breathing and lifting, when the energy is all connected, I think that kind of [feeling] is just on another level,” he says.
HNRY FLWR
Thursday 12, 10pm, Las Perlas
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.