Heather Maloney could be the symbolic voice of Christmases past, present, and future. Even if her words and music during a career that unofficially began in 2009 with a self-released album aren’t usually tied to the holidays, the Massachusetts-based folk singer brings golden pipes, soothing thoughts, and a warm heart to the world through her songs, no matter the season.
Having been an ardent supporter and follower of the artist’s splendid work since our first interview in 2013, ahead of the release of Heather Maloney, her self-titled debut for Signature Sounds, we connected over the years for a number of projects. A couple of articles were published almost yearly around December, leading us to remark kiddingly that it was becoming a Christmas tradition.
After Maloney presented a lyric music video premiere at PopMatters in December 2020 to promote Christmas Anyway, a holiday EP that was her fifth release for Signature Sounds, the music would soon stop.
Like a shattered clock, time also halted for many of us during the year of COVID. But 2021 just got worse for Maloney. Her father died after an ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Though making music was probably the last thing on her mind after such a devastating and personal loss, Maloney finally found the courage and inspiration to pay tribute to her late father with Exploding Star. Signature Sounds will release the singer-songwriter’s first full-length record in five years on 31 January 2025. The esteemed label is located in Northampton, the Pioneer Valley town in Massachusetts, where she has been a longtime resident.
“The pandemic didn’t compare to losing my dad, but the fact that I lost him during it (2021) certainly feels like it compounded things,” Maloney writes in a touching email interview for this article. It is accompanied by her latest lyric music video (of the title track) that premieres exclusively today (13 December) at PopMatters. “It was such a disorienting time on multiple levels, so it took me a long time to reorient myself enough to string any words together that captured what I was going through.
“I think it was almost a year before I wrote the first song of the bunch (‘Exploding Star’). After that song came out, it was like the floodgates had opened because the rest came relatively quickly.”
The video features Maloney’s own illustrations that went beyond the initial 12 carved as linocut prints for each of the album’s songs. Their splendor looks stunning in the hands of animator/filmmaker Jay Reiss, who has collaborated previously with the singer.
“I thought that a string of not-necessarily-related images could all add up to something a bit cacophonous but meaningful,” offers Maloney, whose previous artwork has appeared on other videos (including in 2018 at PopMatters) and used as rewards in her Kickstarter campaigns.
“What we ended up with feels like it represents the song because it’s something that feels expansive (it’s loaded with cosmos stuff), but has small repeating characters and details (my dad’s sweater, the gold/yellow color),” she adds. “And it’s also something that has a loose, overarching narrative (searching for evidence of someone we’ve lost), but also has lots of little micro-narratives (the journey of dad’s belongings, the cassette tape in the bird’s nest).”
So enjoy the lyric music video of “Exploding Star” now, then continue reading to discover more about the album’s making, the fatherly inspiration behind it, and the childhood years Maloney spent in New Jersey while yearning and learning to become a musician.
Launching a Tribute
“To be honest, it feels like the first time in my career I was utterly selfish in my songwriting because I wrote all of these songs with only two things in mind: to make a tribute for my dad and to get through his loss,” declares Maloney, whose upcoming release will be her ninth studio album. Though her prolific output was understandably put on hold, she’s certainly deserved more attention over the years besides the impressive vocal and lyrical comparisons to Joni Mitchell.
“I wasn’t trying to prove anything this time around; I didn’t care about writing the greatest hook possible or the most clever chord change or lyric. I didn’t have anything or anyone else in mind as I wrote. I really was just trying to navigate this painful and profound thing we all go through but don’t talk about nearly enough (grief).”
She was more than willing to frankly discuss the topic further, saying, “In my experience so far, when you go through grief, not only do you lose someone you held dear, you also lose yourself. You lose who you were before they died and the world as you knew it (with them in it). I was actively putting myself back together at this time in my life. … Songwriting was something I leaned on heavily to get me through it.”
Maloney not only found comfort in “some of my closest friends/family/collaborators” to begin a project she initially resisted — “I’d actually already been working on a separate project (that is still in the works!)”. But she also pushed herself to take creative steps toward completing what undoubtedly is her most personal record yet.
She relied on “the readiness of people around me,” from the musical collaborators in High Tea — Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot — for “the most supportive harmonies and arrangements” to producer Don Mitchell. An original member of indie folk band Darlingside who has recorded and performed with Maloney (including on the Woodstock EP), Mitchell also did much of the heavy instrumental lifting in the studio for this LP, playing guitars, keyboards, banjo, and more.
While getting a chance to “road-test” many of the new songs on tour with High Tea last year, Maloney divulges, “At times, it’s been hard to ‘go there’ as a performer, but I feel more and more familiar with the emotional terrain of the music, which I think makes it easier. …
“It has been really touching to see how many tears happen at our shows since we started working the new songs into the set. It might seem like a weird thing to celebrate, but honestly, I feel so privileged that folks feel like our show is in a space where they can be publicly vulnerable like that.”
Certainly, Maloney specializes in writing sad songs, but this album has its share of uplifting moments, too. Besides the vibrant “Light You Leave Behind”, which heralds her dad’s “golden youth” while he was “doing 80 on 80 to Roosevelt Stadium,” Maloney mentions bits of brightness found in “Angelfish”, inspired by the life story of Mark Twain (“who kind of reminds me of my dad, actually”) and “Oh My Green”. The latter, she contends, “is totally loaded with unanswered questions but still feels like a celebration of the cyclical nature of things, an acceptance of how everything must change, and a wish/prayer for them to come back around again.”
Where It All Started
“During the whole process, from writing to recording, I felt more trepidation than I ever have before,” Maloney confesses. “I think that’s the word for it? I don’t know that I’d call it doubt or a lack of confidence (although I have plenty of both).” Those strong feelings likely faded on a road trip to New Jersey.
While starting the album-planning phase, Maloney shares in the record’s liner notes that she discovered that her childhood home in the New Jersey countryside was vacant. After packing a van with recording gear, Mitchell traveled to the “time-capsuled backdrop” of her family life in the mid-1990s, where a two-day recording session in the living room was held.
Revisiting her parents’ former residence in Sandyston, near the Pennsylvania border, Exploding Star songs such as “Leave It to Them” and “Nightbloomer NJ” were tracked, “and even some percussion played on the floors and walls of the house itself!” Maloney reveals.
“I can’t find words for the level of nostalgia I felt just walking into that house,” Maloney responds in our interview about entering through the front door for the first time since exiting about 30 years ago. “I just felt so utterly steeped in memories down to my bones — some of it conscious and most of it murky, but all of it just transported me right back like no time had passed at all. … My dad was a carpenter and my mom is super-handy, so they’d actually done a major renovation on it.
“Every floorboard and tile and light fixture they’d put in with their hands was still exactly how they’d put it,” she continues. “I even lifted the corner of a carpet to find one of my dad’s chewed-up construction pencils (he always had one behind an ear). … Our recording session … was intense 🙂 … But also so healing and cathartic. Singing in that empty house felt like the most direct way I could pay tribute to our memories, to mourn the loss of my dad and the passage of time. I felt lighter when I left. It was a total gift.”
Remembrances of her dad were successfully manifested in other ways, too. Maloney tracked with his old guitar and the Yamaha PSS-270 keyboard/synth (“circa 1986”) she started playing as a kid. Maybe watching a vintage home video of the family walking around a field next to where they once lived helped to summon his sprightly spirit. But Maloney got especially emotional while attempting to record “Leave It to Them”, Exploding Star’s final track.
“When I tried to sing a certain line of the song, I was choking up,” she admits. “It’s a line that feels like it represents the moment I really accepted Dad’s loss.”
“Leave it to the scrubs you wore to see me in when I came to this world / And that same old uniform, still in your drawer, that I wore to see you out.”
Lyrics from Heather Maloney’s “Leave It to Them”
Further elaborating on that song’s closing lyrics, Maloney discloses that her dad “had a tendency to acquire ‘keepsakes’ from restaurants and hotels and apparently even hospitals because when I was caring for him near the end of his life, I found the hospital scrubs he wore on the day I was born. I found myself instinctively putting them on as we got closer to saying goodbye. Something about that uniform punctuating each end of our time together made it all feel so final. … It was hard, but it felt so important to me to be able to sing it until it came out smooth and unbroken.”
Healing thoughts
Honoring her father, Maloney even added a cover among her 11 originals on what seemingly turned into a conscientious concept album. Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” was a song her dad liked, “and it reminds me of something I’d have heard him singing” in his car “always volume-up and windows down” while she listened from the backseat.
“I hadn’t heard the song in a long time, and when I heard the lyrics again somewhat recently, I realized how perfect they articulated what grief can feel like: ‘Still I can’t escape the ghost of you’ and ‘Where is my friend when I need you the most’. … But most of all, the idea that someone has lost their ‘ordinary world’ and they have to find it again and learn to survive in a new normal.”
During our interview near the end of 2020 to discuss her holiday EP, I asked Maloney what was the best Christmas present she received as a child. Her reply: “My dad getting me a Discman might be the best because I remember it basically became a new limb. I went everywhere with that thing. And it had the special ‘anti-skip’ technology (hahaha) so I could walk around in a world of Mariah Carey wherever I went.”
Four years later, she recalls a favorite memory of her father for this article. Maloney connected it to the first song on this new album, the precious “Labyrinth in the Weeds”, reminiscing about that field next to their Sandyston home. “My dad wouldn’t mow until the end of the summer, and when he did, he started by making a winding path through the grass for my (two) brothers and I to run through,” she reflects. “We followed behind his John Deere, and it felt magical.”
And this new kind of hide-and-seek feels more like a tragedy / Grow my soul, grow it tall, I’ll see over all these ending walls and laugh with you from way up there.
Lyrics from Heather Maloney’s “Labyrinth in the Weeds”
These songs will help to ease the pain of a lost loved one while Maloney seeks other ways to heal. A longtime practitioner of meditation, she also relies on therapy to “unpack and sort through things in a lasting way. … The more I think about it, it was a big old mix of things that got me through: music, therapy, friends and family, meditation, following grief accounts on social media (this was surprisingly huge for me!), and finding/connecting with peers that have lost a parent.”
Show of Support
Such sweet reminders of her past probably still linger with Maloney, whose parents got divorced when she was six or seven. Mother and daughter stayed in New Jersey but lived in Hamburg, about 20 miles southeast of Sandyston, while Maloney’s dad and older brother moved to Florida. First taking piano lessons in college, she started writing more songs after learning to play the guitar she got in 2009 from her mother, Kalo.
In our 2013 phone interview, Maloney says of Kalo, an artist who painted the night-blooming cereus image on the Exploding Star cover, “My mother’s definitely been there for me. … She’s definitely been great with convincing me that I’m — or helping me stay convinced — that I’m on the right track.”
If Kalo has been more directly involved in her daughter’s career, Maloney is still grateful for the moral support she received from her dad, whose name and other personal details she prefers not to share after dealing with “a few uncomfy situations with boundaries over the years.”
“Dad came to every show he could within driving distance of where he lived in Florida, and even when his Parkinson’s had gotten pretty bad, he flew up to a show to surprise me,” Maloney states. “He Kickstarted my albums and always asked if I needed help. He would tell me all the time how proud he was of me and maintained a shrine-like music shelf and wall with all of my posters, newspaper clippings, backstage passes, and anything else he’d ask me to save for him. I miss saving things for him.
“I think the most profound support he gave me over the years was this: Whenever we’d catch up on the phone while I was on tour, I’d give him the full report on how it was going, how many people came to the show, how my set went over, if I sold a lot of records or not … and he’d listen supportively, but he’d always respond with something like, ‘That’s great sweetie! Are you having fun?’ It took me years to realize how much it meant that he was more invested in my happiness than my success. It changed my life for the better.”
Besides describing her father as “a great carpenter” who frequently displayed a twinkle in his eye, Maloney also called him “a great athlete; he especially was great at baseball. He was a rock ’n’ roller, a bit mischievous, very witty, very Irish, and, as I’ve said, someone who prioritized having as much fun as possible. He was stubborn but not too stubborn to grow and change. He gave me my sweet tooth. He always kept a stash of candy in his shirt pocket. He had a deep well of one-liners and wisecracks, especially the kind that had a nugget of wisdom at their center. I’m still unwrapping some of them.”
After her parents divorced, “We definitely went through a hard time, all of us,” Maloney acknowledges. “I saw Dad on weekends, and as I grew up, I didn’t visit him as much as I now wish I had. But no amount of circumstance or distance ended up diminishing the love we had for each other.”
So, the night-blooming cereus remains the central symbolism of this album, according to Maloney. “It represents so much that happened in my family, but mostly for me, it’s like the relationship I had with my dad — a rare flower that blooms against all odds (in the desert, at night),” she explains. “In spite of everything we lived through and the horrors of Parkinson’s, we had our love for one another, and it only grew bigger and more resilient up until the end.”
If he were alive today, what would the mischievous rock ’n’ roller tell his darling daughter about the lovely sendoff that is Exploding Star? “I think he’d be equal parts proud and embarrassed to have a tribute album, but mostly, I think he’d want to know if the journey itself felt worthwhile,” Maloney proclaims.
Of course, her journey continues, surely to her late father’s delight. Imagine the family patriarch glowing with pride and watching over Heather from above as she prepares for the January album release, followed by a tour of the United States and Europe beginning in February.
With that trademark twinkle, he’d just have to ask, “Are you having fun?”