What's That Song in the Honda Insight 'Beach' Commercial?

Posted on May 12th 2010 3:30PM by Pat Pemberton
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'The Honey Tree,' by the Mostar Diving Club

When the global economy is down, and the world seems out of sync, it can be therapeutic to think about the beach. And if a sunny mood prompts you to buy a hybrid automobile, well, that's probably OK, too.

Which is, no doubt, what the Santa Monica, Calif.-based ad agency RPA argued when it created a happy, populist ad campaign for the Insight, Honda's latest hybrid car, rolled off the lines on Earth Day a year ago. For the series of commercials, RPA chose to feature breezy, uplifting music by little-known acts -- done, in part, to appeal to a younger demographic Honda wants to reach. (You decide if the decision was made to give unknowns a break or simply because Honda didn't want to pay more money for big-name artists.)

For this beach ad, set somewhere in Southern California, they used 'The Honey Tree,' a lazy, feel-good song that just begs for a ukulele and a straw hat. The song is attributed to the Mostar Diving Club, which is a side project for Damian Katkhuda, who also fronts a band called Obi. The commercial begins with Insights driving on wet pavement -- why is pavement always wet in car commercials? -- on a cloudless day. At this beach, everyone arrives in their Insights at once, as if there's an Insight company picnic. From there, people seem to magically appear from other people. (Many of the actors in the Insight commercials are also dancers, which helped with the timing needed to pull off the visual trickery.)

'The Honey Tree' comes from Mostar's debut album, 'Don Your Suit of Lights,' which features fairly bare songs performed with instruments like the bow saw, banjo, ukulele, harmonium and violins with trumpet attachments.

While you might think 'The Honey Tree' was inspired by a long retreat in Malibu, that's not very likely. For one thing, Katkhuda is from the UK. And his band name Mostar Diving Club comes from a much different part of the world. His father's family is from a city in Bosnia where a rite of passage for young men entails jumping off an old bridge into a shallow river. The bridge jumpers, called the Mostar Diving Club, may seem a bit odd -- jump wrong and it might just be your last rite of passage -- but the dives are a tourist attraction there.

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Can't find that song from that commercial? Send the commercial, movie or TV show to us at whatsthatsong@aim.com.