Much has been made of our modern era of distraction. In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell warns about the deleterious effects of giving in to the forces constantly vying for our attention—social media feeds, gamified consumer culture, the exponentially bleak 24-hour news cycle. She cites the ethicist James Williams, who writes: “In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live.” These aren’t petty concerns, Williams says—there are “deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, well-being, and even the integrity of the self.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Oregon singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx had a well-worn copy of Odell’s work on her bookshelf. On the opening track of Heynderickx’s second album, Seed of a Seed, she frets about this problem of attention: She’s feeling guilty, addicted to her phone and avoiding texts while counting up “the useless things I’ve bought for someone’s profit.” But she’s being chased by another version of herself, one who finally gets Heynderickx to slow down and refocus her attention—specifically, to “stare at purple clover off the highway.” The flowers help; suddenly, the song’s anxiously strummed heartbeat slows, blossoming into washes of gentle acoustic and sweeping electric guitar.
This suggestion—that a turn towards the natural world can be an escape from the chaos of modern life—runs throughout Heynderickx’s songwriting (and, in fact, is a key tenant of How To Do Nothing). On her debut, 2018’s I Need to Start a Garden, Heynderickx compared human kindness to “honeycomb/Holding the bee in the folds,” and her vision of romance included gently scooping a bug out of her lover’s room. The “brink of my existence essentially is a comedy,” she sang; the solution, naturally, was “to start a garden.”
On Seed of a Seed, Heynderickx foregrounds this theme and explores her internal anxieties and the wisdom that can be gleaned outside the confines of our minds. She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing. Her songs often take place in the borderlands between modernity and nature: She doubts the fulfillment of big-city dreams while twirling a foxglove. She is stuck driving her car but finds time to commune with a pebble in a stream. Cell phones and hummingbirds show up nearly in equal measure. While her fingerpicked guitar forms the emotional core of her songs, she nudges her sonic palette a little wider 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 in the Sink” lend the song a spare, intimate feel.
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