A lot has been fabricated from our trendy period of distraction. In her 2019 e book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell warns concerning the deleterious results of giving in to the forces consistently vying for our consideration—social media feeds, gamified shopper tradition, the exponentially bleak 24-hour information cycle. She cites the ethicist James Williams, who writes: “Within the brief time period, distractions can preserve us from doing the issues we wish to do. In the long run, nevertheless, they will accumulate and preserve us from residing the lives we wish to reside.” These aren’t petty issues, Williams says—there are “deep moral implications lurking right here for freedom, well-being, and even the integrity of the self.”
I wouldn’t be stunned if Oregon singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx had a well-worn copy of Odell’s work on her bookshelf. On the opening observe of Heynderickx’s second album, Seed of a Seed, she frets about this downside of consideration: She’s feeling responsible, hooked on her cellphone and avoiding texts whereas counting up “the ineffective issues I’ve purchased for somebody’s revenue.” However she’s being chased by one other model of herself, one who lastly will get Heynderickx to decelerate and refocus her consideration—particularly, to “stare at purple clover off the freeway.” The flowers assist; instantly, the tune’s anxiously strummed heartbeat slows, blossoming into washes of mild acoustic and sweeping electrical guitar.
This suggestion—{that a} flip in the direction of the pure world may be an escape from the chaos of recent life—runs all through Heynderickx’s songwriting (and, actually, is a key tenant of How To Do Nothing). On her debut, 2018’s I Have to Begin a Backyard, Heynderickx in contrast human kindness to “honeycomb/Holding the bee within the folds,” and her imaginative and prescient of romance included gently scooping a bug out of her lover’s room. The “brink of my existence primarily is a comedy,” she sang; the answer, naturally, was “to begin a backyard.”
On Seed of a Seed, Heynderickx foregrounds this theme and explores her inner anxieties and the knowledge that may be gleaned outdoors the confines of our minds. She tells these tales in a honey-rich voice that may sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing. Her songs typically happen within the borderlands between modernity and nature: She doubts the achievement of big-city goals whereas twirling a foxglove. She is caught driving her automotive however finds time to commune with a pebble in a stream. Cell telephones and hummingbirds present up practically in equal measure. Whereas her fingerpicked guitar varieties the emotional core of her songs, she nudges her sonic palette just a little wider right here. Cello and trombone give songs like “Redwoods (Anxious God)” and “Sorry Fahey” an earthy richness and depth; the spindly guitar riffs and close-tracked harmonies on “Spit within the Sink” lend the tune a spare, intimate really feel.
