This Saturday during an early show at Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club, Haley Heynderickx and her band kept professing her gratitude for the opportunity, the music, and the crowd. It was in tune with her folky persona and grounded second album, Seed of a Seed, of which she played every song. The tracks have “all of my angst and love and joy and messages woven into them,” she mentioned, and made her feel better during the pandemic. “Each of them was recorded with love.”

Heynderickx and her band cultivated the same atmosphere as the record induces, one of tranquility and softness. Much of the album concerns a love of nature and admonishment of technology, particularly the smartphone (she hails from Portland, Oregon), and hoped it makes people put their phones down every once in a while. “Thanks for allowing me to have a career with no social media presence,” she said at one point, and fan-favorite track “Redwoods (Ancient God)” is about small secrets the redwoods, nettle leaves, and walnut trees are able to tell her. Noticeably, there wasn’t much filming. “If I get lucky, maybe a simple life,” she says on the title track, “If I get lucky, maybe some free time.”

Two songs in, she stopped to introduce her band with utmost care and respect, saying that “this project would not have been able to grow without these humans.” Each of them shared a fun fact about themselves, ranging from the cellist’s love of thrifting to one bandmate’s first language being Japanese, and another who had lived in the United States undocumented for two decades. He was Filipino, same as Haley, and the last track on the album, “Swoop,” is an ode to her mother who immigrated from Hong Kong. “Plump was the child she would grow / And a know-it-all, it’s true.”

She played some tracks from her 2018 debut, I Need to Start a Garden, as well, with the biggest responses for “Drinking Song,” “The Bug Collector,” and “Oom Sha La La.” She ended with the last one, respectfully opting not to have an encore in order to avoid the acting of the whole thing (“What is an encore? We go behind the sheet? And we giggle?”). It’s an existential, funny track, about the duality of life — her biggest problems include sour milk and the unavoidable question of one’s own existence on this planet. At the apex, everyone in the room began to chant the album’s motif, “I need to start a garden!” it felt like a reprieve, promise, and cathartic release.

Words and photography by Sam Franzini

Order Seed Of A Seed HERE