By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
Heather Maloney almost didn’t release her upcoming album, “Exploding Star,” to the public. An album born of grief and loss was too raw, too personal, to go public, she felt, so she kept it for herself. But when her closest friends and family suggested that it could help others who were grieving, Maloney changed her mind and decided to share the album with the world — and it’ll make its debut in Northampton in two weeks.
STAFF PHOTO/DANIEL JACOBI II
Heather Maloney plays her late father’s guitar on her newest album, “Exploding Star,” which comes out on Jan. 31. Maloney will kick off her album release tour with two shows at the Iron Horse at 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 7, and Saturday, Feb. 8. The Saturday show is already sold out.
“Exploding Star” will release on streaming platforms on Friday, Jan. 31, and Maloney will kick off her album release tour with two shows at the Iron Horse at 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 7, and Saturday, Feb. 8.
Maloney, who describes herself as a “writer song-singer,” wrote the album in the wake of her father’s death in September 2021, initially without the intent of anything more than “purely a cathartic, therapeutic practice for me.” She had to reckon not only with the loss of her father, but also with the loss of herself — with the person she was before he died. The notion of turning such a profoundly sad and transformative experience into a record, let alone an accompanying tour and all of the associated promotion and marketing that came with it, felt, at first, morally wrong.
“That’s what keeps our musical world spinning around,” she said, “but the idea of running the loss of my dad through that machine — oof.”
STAFF PHOTO/DANIEL JACOBI II
Heather Maloney holds a photograph of herself with her late father, whose death in September 2021 was the catalyst behind her upcoming album, “Exploding Star,” which will be released Jan. 31.
It was her close friends and family, however, who helped convince her to make those songs public, both validating her concerns and suggesting the album might help other people who had also experienced significant loss themselves. As Maloney learned more about grief — both from research and her own experiences — she became more inclined to agree with them.
“I guess I had the right people in my life,” she said. “That’s what changed my mind.”
Both the easiest and hardest song for Maloney to write was the album’s title track, “Exploding Star.” “Easiest” is a relative term, though — it took Maloney more than a year to be able to write it after the heavy experience of having to empty out her father’s house and sort through all of his belongings, “so many objects that are attached to stories and eras of my life and his.”
Even so, she said, that track “came out all at once”: “The song itself, musically and lyrically, is just something that was ready to burst.”
It’s fitting that this album was born out of a sense of isolation, because a key experience in Maloney’s musical career was, ironically, her time at a silent meditation retreat.
STAFF PHOTO/DANIEL JACOBI II
Heather Maloney’s work on her upcoming release, “Exploding Star,” goes beyond writing and performing: she’s also a linocut artist and illustrator. She carved a linocut print for each of the 12 songs on the album, and the official lyric video for the song “Exploding Star” features animated versions of her illustrations.
Maloney has classical training in a few music genres, but she left an in-progress degree in operatic performance unfinished when she went to live and work as a cook at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, which offers silent meditation retreats throughout the year. One day, while sitting in meditation, an idea came to her — “a string of lyrics that were tied to a melody.” She worked on the song (and, later, others) in her private cottage at the retreat center. Her early work grew from things that she realized about herself in meditation: “I felt, for the first time in my life, I had reasons to write songs that felt really meaningful to me.”
Every so often, circumstances — like a group circle at the end of a retreat, for example — provided her with an opportunity to perform. (The center isn’t fully silent every single day of the year.) Maloney eventually left Insight, and she moved elsewhere to the Valley, where, she said, “I felt a sense of belonging there that I never did feel” in her home state — “Don’t tell New Jersey!”
In many ways, this album grew from Maloney’s childhood home in New Jersey: not only did its songs draw from her memories of her father there, but the official video for the song “Labyrinth in the Weeds,” inspired by a memory of her father mowing paths into an overgrown lawn for Maloney and her brothers to run through, includes home video footage her parents shot there in the 1980s. In fact, the house, by that point vacant, also served as the “studio” where Maloney and her collaborators Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot (the duo who comprise the band High Tea) recorded the album in a two-day session in the summer of 2023.
STAFF PHOTO/DANIEL JACOBI II
Heather Maloney plays her late father’s guitar at her studio in western Massachusetts. Maloney’s new album, “Exploding Star,” comes out on Friday, Jan. 31 and is her first full-length studio album in five years.
Maloney’s work on the album goes beyond writing and performing: she’s also a linocut artist and illustrator. (Her mother Kalo, herself an artist as well, painted the album’s cover.) She carved a linocut print for each of the 12 songs on the album, and the official lyric video for the song “Exploding Star” features animated versions of her illustrations.
When “Exploding Star” comes out, it’ll be Maloney’s first full-length studio album released in five years. It’ll be the result of a Kickstarter campaign that raised $25,000 in only four days (and has since raised more than $43,000). It’ll be a deeply personal project with incredible significance to its creator.
And, after so long, it’ll be ready for the public to hear. After the Iron Horse, Maloney’s album release tour will visit 18 other U.S. cities and Amsterdam.
STAFF PHOTO/DANIEL JACOBI II
Heather Maloney holds the cover artwork for her upcoming album, “Exploding Star,” which was painted by her mother, Kalo. “The night-blooming cereus is a significant symbol in my record and in my family,” Maloney said.
Tour dates and more info can be found at heathermaloney.com.
Tickets to Maloney’s Friday show at the Iron Horse start at $42 via ironhorse.org. The Saturday show is already sold out.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
