Every week, 88Nine music director Erin Wolf shares a sonic gem she found using her nearly 20 years of new-music exploration experience. You can hear all her discoveries live on 88Nine at 10 p.m. every Monday on What’s All This: Adventures in New Music.
Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover just announced their joint album, What of Our Nature, which was created in the spirit of folk icon Woody Guthrie. Echoing in the folk icon’s footsteps, beautiful simplicity is found throughout their project.
Their collaboration began from opposite corners of the country, eventually joining up to record directly to tape in a Vermont barn in five days’ time. Their combined, simple musical messages were the culmination of a year spent “sharing songs while reading Woody’s words and biographies, slowly exploring a patchwork of Americanism to see where their stories fit.”
Throughout What of Our Nature, García Conover (who is half-Puerto Rican) and Heynderickx (who is half-Filipina) touch on broad, personal themes of colonialism, generational identity, social equity and commercialism. That final theme gets particular attention on “Fluorescent Light,” one of two new lead singles that dropped recently to announce the album.
Written and led by Heynderickx, the seemingly jaunty song bemoans the modern era in which everyone is subject to constant marketing, bathed in the unnatural light of phones and, when they’re not holding their devices, “of schools and prisons and dying.” Heynderickx’s voice is wonderful as usual, and the effortlessness of the collaboration radiates — no surprise considering they’ve joined their musical voices together before.
Find What of Our Nature out Nov. 21 on Fat Possum Records and “Fluorescent Light” from Haley Heynderickx and Max Garcia Conover on the latest episode of What’s All This, which you can enjoy in full using the player at the top of the page.
Best new indie music this week
- Sharp Pins, “Queen of Globes and Mirrors”
- This Is Lorelei, “Name the Band”
- Cusp, “In A Box”
- Ain’t, “Long Short Round”
- Pia Fraus, “Nothing Returns”
- Lala Lala, “Does This Go Faster?”
- Haley Heynderickx, Max Garcia Conover, “Fluorescent Light”
- Rachel Bobbitt, “Remember?”
- DARKSIDE, “One Last Nothing”
- Sassy 0009, Blood Orange, “Tell Me”
- Gordi, “Instant Life”
- Jean Dawson, “White Lighter”
