Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed | Album Review
/
Mama Bird Recording Co.
Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? This is something I’m sure everyone has thought at some point in their life, whether that’s in relation to a big life decision such as a move or career change, the direction of a relationship, or something as simple as a literal wrong turn while driving. As a person who grew up in the Information Age, with every global horror and consequence of full-throttle late-stage capitalism beamed directly into my brain, that question becomes haunting and so much bigger than myself. I know for a fact I’m not alone in that torment. If there’s one idea that much of my favorite art from 2024 explores, it would be that kind of existential dread: a cocktail of emptiness and anxiety that can only come from living day-to-day in a world that’s seemingly spiraling more and more out of our control.
This year, I’ve heard everyone from Vince Staples to MJ Lenderman struggle to find meaning, let alone happiness, in modern times. On “Seed of a Seed,” the lead single and title track off of her long-awaited sophomore album, Haley Heynderickx is in the midst of this same search for contentment. “Cause we all need a sense of lore sometimes / Like I need a silent mind / In a consumer flood,” she sings in one of the verses, the swaying guitar pattern tracking the whole song, joined by a forlorn cello. She wonders if her parents and her “parents’ parents” knew any better before quickly concluding that they couldn’t have. Seed of a Seed is an album concerned with a great many things, but the thought that Heynderickx returns to over and over is this idea of cycles and history and how to reconnect with nature and serenity when we’re caught up in systems far outside of one person’s control. Maybe we took that wrong turn a long time ago…
For the unfamiliar, Haley Heynderickx is a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose debut album, I Need to Start a Garden, has netted her a devoted following in the six years since its release off the back of its enchanting take on indie folk. Where many of her peers blend folk with indie pop and rock influences from the 90s and 2000s, Heynderickx seems to draw from a much older well of inspiration, with mid-20th century folk and jazz chief among them. I remember catching her road test new material while opening for Lucy Dacus on her 2022 jaunt through the Northwest and feeling transported to the late 60s, wondering if this is what it felt like to stumble into a New York bar and watch Joni Mitchell hone now-classic songs.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has had the opportunity to hear Haley Heynderickx perform in the past two years that Seed of a Seed finds her doubling down on her classic influences while bringing them into the 21st century. “Gemini” begins the album in a place of anxiety, with Heynderickx channeling Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as she attempts to push down the part of herself railing against all the mundane anxieties of daily life. Nothing is spared, as everything from phone addiction and ignored messages to aimless spending and annoyed strangers get namechecked in a storm of distractions. Each repetition of the guitar motif is underscored by a rising tension until she finally relents to that voice and all the instrumentation joins in what may as well be the musical transcription of a deep breath.
Regardless of how in vogue her influences are, the strength of Heynderickx’s songwriting is undeniable, as evidenced by “The Bug Collector” off of her debut eventually going viral on social media platforms like TikTok years after release. In that song, she gently removes insects from sight out of love for a panicked partner, but on Seed of a Seed, she has turned her attention to the bugs themselves. “Redwoods (Anxious God)” sees Heynderickx cutting through a forest of whimsical imagery straight out of a mythological fable, repeating a message she received from a pebble: “Humankind is getting lost / Not even little bugs want to talk with us.” The harmony between man and our neighbors is blocked by an impossibly high barricade centuries in the making. It’s a sentiment that risks coming off as hippie preaching, but the childlike wonder captured in both the imagery and plucky performances puts even someone as terminally online as myself right there with Heynderickx. With each infectious refrain, I imagine dancing among the eponymous redwoods and yearning to hear their wisdom, only for the final line to bring me crashing back to civilization.
Elsewhere, “Mouth of a Flower” ponders the hierarchy of the world, tracing the life cycle from a hummingbird drinking a flower’s nectar to the various ways that humans have taken from the environment and each other. Once again, it’s easy to imagine this inducing some eye rolls in the hands of a less compelling writer, but Haley’s tone is never accusatory. There’s so much beauty in the give and take between man and nature, but also an underlying concern about how imbalanced these exchanges have become as our consumption continues to expand. Flourishes of cello and electric guitar inject extra moments of color into the song, but the former sours towards the end, its chugging rhythm twisting the core refrain, “And we take, and we take, and we take,” into something unnerving.
These moments of tension may underscore the themes of overstimulation and imbalance, but it’s well worth noting that the experience of listening to Seed of a Seed is so far from either. I only stress them so heavily because it’s easy to get swept up in just how beautiful the vast majority of this record sounds and miss those hints of darkness. Haley Heynderickx pulls a kind of magic trick on the listener with this record. She and her band are able to conjure up their own archaic and grandeur sonic environment so casually that the appeal seems simple to anyone tuning in, but there is a meticulous craft behind it all. Their attention to detail is infectious. Every production choice, each slide of the trombone or pluck of a guitar string, sounds perfectly designed to make you appreciate the nearest patch of green in your vicinity.
On “Gemini,” this manifests as her “pull[ing] the fuck over just to stare at purple clover off the highway,” kickstarting a series of interrogations into what really matters in her life. Seed of a Seed feels like it’s constantly trying to bottle that moment of realignment of the self and give it to the listener – a plea to value what is in front of us rather than striving for what isn’t. Nowhere is Haley more transparent about this endeavor than on “Sorry Fahey,” where she ponders the correlation between learning to appreciate the little things in life and the trials of adult life. It’s both achingly earnest and playful in a way that’s fast becoming a signature of Heynderickx’s music, full of musical twists and turns, as well as the songwriter lovingly admonishing her cat for being an asshole.
Maybe to be an adult
To know your body keeps score
Is when you start to appreciate
Start to really appreciate
That you could call your Pa
Or a friend
And not bail on
The thing next Tuesday
Cause it’s a new day
It’s an offering
It’s a kettle
Making you tea
Ginger
It’s this that acts as the key to Haley’s outlook. Finding peace and purpose as an act of gentle protest is an idea that flows throughout the record. “Tell me truly, what is your dream? Tell me truly, is it the city life?” Heynderickx probes on the magnificent single “Foxglove,” asking the listener to reconsider what they need to be happy with in this life. The daydream may die, but that doesn’t mean fulfillment goes with it. That idea has followed me ever since I made my way through Northwest Portland alongside my partner one recent evening. As we walked by all the locally owned storefronts as they closed down for the night and the autumn wind blew through the trees, I felt her chilled hand in mine and was overwhelmed by an increasingly rare sense of contentment. My mind flickered back to the title track’s mantra: “If I get lucky / Maybe a glass of wine / If I get lucky /Maybe a hand next to mine.”
More than creature comforts or even the majesty of nature, Seed of a Seed imparts the importance of community to its listeners. After all, if people are responsible for the messes we find ourselves in, maybe it’s people who can help untangle that same bundle of stressors and fears. Viewed through this lens, that choice of title seems even more clever. We are all products of our environment and those who came before us and, by extension, their environments and the choices they’ve made. We are caught up in an impossibly sprawling tapestry of these people’s choices, which can be terrifying to think about. How can positive change ever be enacted with so many moving pieces out of our control and at odds with one another?
But there’s beauty in this idea, too. On the album’s unassuming closer, “Swoop,” Heynderickx directly reckons with her own family history and how she wound up in the station she finds herself in. She recounts her grandmother’s immigration from Hong Kong and the birth of her mother before visiting the former’s grave, settling into a sense of belonging at her place within this lineage. It’s a perfect punctuation after the wistful “Jerry’s Song” chronicles the shared experiences of a tried-and-true bond. In that song, she compares herself to clay and her subject to limestone amidst a flurry of memories, a different blurred image coming into focus with each listen. A cheeky line about splitting a sandwich in “divided America” feels prescient in hindsight, but it only highlights Haley’s belief in the power of little things. That tapestry already has so much conflict and innumerable clashing threads, so maybe the most anyone can do at the individual level is to be kind and generous to those immediately around them. It’s slow work, but if enough join in, something beautiful could be woven into the piece.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing Haley Heynderickx again in the last month, almost two years since those opening slots, and with a full band this time around. It was a full circle moment to have songs I’d first heard in a live setting performed after becoming familiar with them for the purposes of this review, but more than any particular song they played, it’s an interaction with the crowd that keeps crossing my mind. In an interval between songs, an audience member asked if Haley had managed to start her garden, to which she ruefully admitted she hadn’t, citing limited living spaces and her touring schedule. Her trombonist, Denzel Mendoza, was quick to reaffirm by gesturing to the room and calling either the music, the moment, the audience, or a mix of all three “her garden.” It was a genuinely sweet exchange, and you could tell it meant a lot to the singer to think of it that way. Even if she hadn’t considered it before, Seed of a Seed is a product of that mindset: ten songs meant to sow the simple joys of nature and companionship into the brains of all who hear them. If we’re lucky, it will reap a bountiful harvest.
Wesley Cochran lives in Portland, OR where he works, writes, and enjoys keeping up with music of all kinds, with a particular fondness for indie rock. You can find him @ohcompassion on Twitter, via his email electricalmess@gmail.com, or at any Wilco show in the Pacific Northwest.
