Haley Heynderickx Album Review

Haley Heynderickx is a folk singer based in Portland, Oregon. She is 32 years old and just had her third album come out last month, What's Of Our Nature, and she worked on it with Max Garcia Conover. Haley Heynderickx described this album as  “a shared gaze towards Woody Guthrie and to write from what it feels like living in America.” (If you don't know who Woody Guthrie is, he is an American folk singer known for speaking out against the government and bringing awareness to things he believes.) You can definitely see the inspiration in the ten tracks she has written, and how it is a political commentary on America today. She brings up topics like poverty, police brutality, and greed among billionaires. 

The first song on the album is called “Song For Alicia.” Max Garcia Conover sings this song, and he tells the story of a woman named Alicia Rodriguez and how she gets sent to prison, “no trial, charge, or conviction.” Lyrics from the song include “‘You cannot own a country, you do not own a country.’/ And so two guards took her legs and held her to the floor/ while another punched her in the face and gagged her like before /And she got fifty years or more, and they never said what for.” This adds to the Alicia story by showing the fact that she speaks up for herself and gets beaten by the police in court, and then gets sent to jail for most of her life with no reasoning. This song tells a story that would not be told normally, and that's why I find this song so important; it really sets a mood for the whole album.

The second song on the album is “Mr Marketer.” This song tells the story of commercialism and greed, how it has been a generational problem, and how it can affect one's self-identity. In the song, she sings, “What I was told I was destined to grow/ A bold-hearted woman I thought I'd never know/ A home with a garden.” This illustrates the idea she was told to be this person, to just work and work to help whoever is in power, to just dream of a nice, quiet life and a house with a garden.  

The third song on the album is called “Boars.” This song brings up commercialism and greed throughout the song, and how we need to reconnect with nature. The song uses lines like “silver sage, ruddy poet on the page/ Downy eared, cutty hogs digging in the reservoir/ Montserrat money makers rooting in the rutabaga.” When you listen to this song, it feels more like a spoken word poem rather than a song because of how they wrote line rhymes even with the next, which really helps get their message across.

The fourth song is called “ Cowboying.” This song touches on topics of social injustice and uses a metaphor of a cowboy as an outlaw figure navigating a broken system. In the song, they sing, “Sure, I murdered, and I stole, but don't call me evil. It was mostly just money and people,” this is them admitting to doing inherently bad things, but it is for survival because of the corrupt system and not having good living wages. 

The fifth song on the album is “In Bulosan‘s Words.” The theme of this song is the struggles of immigrants, particularly Filipino-Americans, and the hard jobs they have to do, and how they have to deal with their problems in silence. In the song, she sings, “I learned that poverty is normal, I learned the language hurts my tongue, learned the jobs are scarce like cutlery as sharp as hunger to my stomach, and my bravery's still nameless.” This illustrates the message of immigrants being treated less than everyone else.

The sixth song on the album is called “This Morning I am Born Again,” a song about profound spiritual and personal renewal, embracing vulnerability, finding light in emptiness, and realizing our deep connection to others through shared people, using nature metaphors like “So we hip the sumac lip the dew sap rip the rabbit line, So we dash the sundrenched tacked and tongueless no trespassing signs, Like raspberries and leaves and steam we reach into our skies, And there is only emptiness against us” this show growth from inward struggle towards collective care and hope.

The seventh song on the album is “Fluorescent Light.” This song critiques modern capitalist society, artificiality, and commercialism, contrasting it with a lost "ancient light" or authentic human experience, suggesting we're trapped in a sterile, profit-driven world, yet finding rebellion in simple human connection and art. In the song, she sings, “Grown men want to profit/

With their fingers on their trigger/ but when life gets cheaper/ then the dead have to dig deeper.” This adds to the points she is trying to make about greed among the rich and how all they care about is getting richer and not about people who have less than them.

The eighth song is “Buffalo, 1981.” This song addresses the poverty in America and how the government does not do much about the problem.  The first verse in the song is “Hungry people want food, so the wealthy make committees/  and they say things like, ‘The problem is single-parent families’/ And the parents they imprison weren't gonna be good anyway/

And the parents they employ should be grateful when they’re paid.” This demonstrates how families in America are being underpaid and are not getting the things they need, and the government is blaming the family for this problem, saying that they are not working hard enough.  

The ninth song is “To Each Their Dot.” The song is about finding yourself and within the world, and where you fit in with others. In the title, it has the word dot, which represents the idea in the song where each person is a dot and their own person.

The tenth song on the album is “Red River Dry.” The main message of the song is generational trauma. The red river represents carrying the trauma and the pain from generation to generation. “And the river dried up a family line/ And the rhythm slowed.” This illustrates the idea of generational trauma in the song.

Overall, I like this album a lot. It was really good based on how I interpreted the album. I feel the topics that she sings about are important topics in the world today, and are bringing awareness to a lot of people's stories that most people don’t normally hear about. It is definitely one of the best folk albums that came out this year.