Heather Maloney — Heather Maloney (2013)

 

Heather Maloney — Heather Maloney

“…a precious gem”  —  Huffington Post
“Heather Maloney the record is as hard to categorize as Heather Maloney the person, and seemingly that’s the way she likes it. Her music is riveting, her voice adventurous, her lyrics thought-provoking.”   —  No Depression
Location: Northampton, MA ~ Albany, NY
Album release: March 12, 2013
Record Label: Signature Sounds
Duration:     39:48
Tracks:
01 Great Imposter     3:17
02. Hey Broken     1:51
03 Fire For You     2:40
04 Dirt and Stardust     5:31
05 Flutter     2:59
06 Iron Bull     4:07
07 Turn Yourself Around     3:47
08 Miss Mary Mack     3:10
09 Grace     4:00
10 Darlene     3:53
11 Flying on Helium     4:23
♣   Heather Maloney is the acclaimed songwriter's self-titled debut for Signature Sounds. The western Massachusetts based artist has received numerous accolades for her startlingly soulful voice and literate songwriting exploring themes of spirituality, transformation, and impermanence.
♣   "Heather Maloney" is the third album for a songwriter hailed by The Huffington Post for “lyrics that cut to the chase”, while DigBoston wrote that she “deserves the type of cult following that has allowed the likes of Aimee Mann and Ani DiFranco that long standing success and influence they have had.” Maloney marks life lessons on this album, penning tuneful reminders to herself about the little triumphs of love on “Flutter,” the solace of redemption on “Turn Yourself Around” and her firm belief that nothing’s colder than trying too hard to be cool, an idea that inspired “Fire for You.” Although Maloney’s influences are largely rooted in what she calls “adventurous folk,” she pushes outward on these 11 songs, digging deeper, and roaming wider, than she has before on songs populated by vivid characters that ultimately trace their way back to her.
REVIEW
By ALEX GALLACHER; 18 JUNE 2013
♣   With two albums already under her belt Heather Maloney’s latest self-titled release marks her debut on the Signature Sounds record label where fellow stable mates include the likes of Chris Smither, Josh Ritter and Jeffrey Foucault. The album also marks a noticeable musical shift with this release carrying more clout than previous with a greater diversity of sound from folk music to good ole Rock’n’Roll. There are soulful slow burners as well as fast paced sharp shooting lyrics calling to mind the likes of Ani Difranco and Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi.
♣   Great Imposter kicks the album off, a track on which she dives into that new found territory with positive glee. The album feels more daring than previous offerings and suggests a new found freedom that she’s willing to explore and play with as she demonstrates on the short catchy Hey Broken with its bouncy a capella and male harmonies driven along by hand claps and foot stomps. If push came to shove Flutter would be my personal stand-out track with its lovely skittering percussion and lush bass-line that dances around Heather’s confident melodic and playful delivery. Iron Bull has got to be the crowd pleaser, a ‘Mustang Sally’esque’ rock number that will get anyone off of their seat whilst Turn Yourself Around just digs deep deep down, a great soulful offering.
♣   It is Dirt and Sawdust that Heather describes as her folky centerpiece of the album, “On one level, it’s a song about a rambling woman, an idea whose origins were simple enough: “Who doesn’t love songs about ramblers?” Maloney says. ♣   “It’s adventurous, and heartbreaking, but beautiful.”
Heather’s lyrics come across as being very heartfelt and sincere, a reflection of the importance she has placed upon song-writing as a release mechanism possibly that she only began exploring a few years ago after living and later working for a silent-retreat Buddhist meditation center in central Massachusetts. “The biggest motivating factor in writing was probably the experiences that I was having here in my meditation practice,” she says. “There was the difficulty of it, the suffering of it, and wanting to channel that into something creative, and on the positive side, the insights that came out of my experiences.”
♣   This release is a defining milestone in her musical career, not so much ambitious as adventurous and one which will reap many rewards.
Fortaken: http://www.folkradio.co.uk/
Also:
BY MARY LEARY;  Score: ****
• http://blurtonline.com/review/heather-maloney-heather-maloney/
BY JUSTIN BELAND; WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 2013 AT 9:38AM
• http://chunkyglasses.com/content/review-heather-maloney-heather-maloney.html
By Jeremy D. Goodwin |  GLOBE CORRESPONDENT     MAY 17, 2013
• http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2013/05/17/singer-songwriter-heather-maloney-keeps-her-music-moment/gN86SyWE3DRbB3QxLHq63I/story.html
Website: http://heathermaloney.com/
MySpace: https://myspace.com/heather_maloney
Bandcamp: http://heathermaloney.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathermaloneymusic
E-mail:
Press:
Agent:
Label: http://shop.signaturesounds.com/album/heather-maloney
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Biography:
♣   “I always said that if I didn’t write songs, I’d be covered in tattoos, because every song I write is something I want to remember really badly,” says Heather Maloney.
♣   She has no ink so far. Instead, the Northampton, Mass., singer and songwriter is marking life lessons with music on her new self-titled album, penning tuneful reminders to herself about the little triumphs of love on “Flutter,” the solace of redemption on “Turn Yourself Around” and her firm belief that nothing’s colder than trying too hard to be cool, an idea that inspired “Fire for You.”
♣   "Heather Maloney", out in March on Signature Sounds, is the third album for a songwriter hailed by The Huffington Post for “lyrics that cut to the chase.” Dig Boston wrote that she “deserves the type of cult following that has allowed the likes of Aimee Mann and Ani DiFranco that long standing success and influence they have had.”
♣   Although Maloney’s influences are largely rooted in what she calls “adventurous folk,” she pushes outward on these 11 songs, digging deeper, and roaming wider, than she has before on songs populated by vivid characters that ultimately trace their way back to her. She adds juicy touches of pop, and a little dash of rock ’n’ roll on “Iron Bull,” a song she wrote after visiting Zucotti Park during, Occupy Wall Street
♣   “It’s become more multi-dimensional,” she says, a change she credits to the way she approached "Heather Maloney". She mostly performed by herself in concert when she made her first two albums, so the recorded songs didn’t sound the way they did when she played them live. This time, she road-tested the new material with Ken Maiuri (Mark Mulcahy, the Young at Heart Chorus) on bass and J.J. O’Connell on drums, fine-tuning songs as she performed them in front of audiences before heading into the studio.
♣   If there’s a typical path to becoming a songwriter, Maloney didn’t follow it. Although she went to school for music and had done plenty of singing, she only began writing tunes a few years ago after living and working for three years in a silent-retreat meditation center in central Massachusetts.
♣   “The biggest motivating factor in writing was probably the experiences that I was having here in my meditation practice,” she says. “There was the difficulty of it, the suffering of it, and wanting to channel that into something creative, and on the positive side, the insights that came out of my experiences.”
♣   Those experiences proved especially inspirational on “Dirt & Stardust,” the folky centerpiece of the album. On one level, it’s a song about a rambling woman, an idea whose origins were simple enough: “Who doesn’t love songs about ramblers?” Maloney says. “It’s adventurous, and heartbreaking, but beautiful.”
♣   On a deeper level, though, it’s a song about embracing impermanence. “I don’t want these walls to wall me in forever,” Maloney begins, singing with the hint of a quaver in her sweet voice tinged with earthy grit. “Don’t want to make my home on fenced-in land. We can buy our lot, we can mark our spot but we’re travelers whether we like it or not, so please make my castle out of sand.”
♣   “It led me back to the meditation practice,” she explains. “A large part of what this practice is aiming to get you to recognize is that everything is impermanent, and not only to recognize that, but to be OK with that, and maybe even celebrate that. So in this song I’m trying to express this woman’s complicated relationship with impermanence.”
♣   It’s not just an expression of the character’s relationship. Like most of Maloney’s songs, “Dirt & Stardust” is ultimately about herself, though sometimes her songs are personal in a way that only dawns on her later.
♣   “I prefer to start writing like I’m writing about somebody else, and maybe it turns out to be autobiographical,” she says. “Sometimes it even happens long after I’ve written the song and I’m performing it live, and I suddenly feel naked, like, ‘Whoa, this is really about me, isn’t it?’ It’s just that I’m in a room full of people when I realize it.”
♣   It’s no surprise that those rooms are getting more and more crowded as people discover her smart, catchy and soulful music. Just wait until they fall in love with the songs on "Heather Maloney".
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Heather Maloney — Heather Maloney (2013)

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