{"id":147728,"date":"2025-06-04T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=147728"},"modified":"2025-06-02T11:50:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T18:50:13","slug":"review-heather-maloney-mourns-and-celebrates-her-father-on-exploding-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/review-heather-maloney-mourns-and-celebrates-her-father-on-exploding-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Heather Maloney Mourns and Celebrates Her Father on \u2018Exploding Star\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cAre you floating in the cosmos, finally free from time\/ While I\u2019m down here on the highway looking for signs?\u201d asks Heather Maloney in the title track from her new album, Exploding Star<\/a>,<\/em> over the light 6\/8 strum of her guitar. The lyrics address her father in the wake of his passing, and build to this arresting image in the chorus: \u201cI emptied out your house like a slowly exploding star\/ I scattered you around, and now you\u2019re all spread out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Exploding<\/a>
Exploding Star<\/em>, Heather Maloney (Signature Sounds)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Songwriters often process intense personal experiences through writing, and Maloney responded to the loss of her father with a flood of songs. She initially planned to keep this music private, but friends convinced her to share it, and we are lucky they did. The resulting album is a beautiful and emotionally deep piece of work\u2014suffused with sadness yet ultimately conveying a feeling of celebration of familial love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maloney, based in western Massachusetts, has been a standout singer-songwriter since releasing her debut album, Time and Pocket Change<\/a>,<\/em> back in 2011\u2014she\u2019s a gifted vocalist with a folk-pop sensibility and a poet\u2019s eye for language, akin to such artists as Ana\u00efs Mitchell and Dar Williams. For Exploding Star,<\/em> Maloney teamed up with her longtime friend Don Mitchell, of the harmony-driven band Darlingside, as producer, and the duo High Tea (Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Elliot) helped build subtle, layered arrangements of voices and instruments. The supporting vocals are prominent and gorgeous throughout the album\u2014more like a chamber choir than conventional backup singing.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images of Maloney\u2019s father pop up across the songs. In the expansive opening track, \u201cLabyrinth in the Weeds,\u201d she portrays an early memory of him mowing paths through an overgrown field for the kids to play in, as the music builds from harmonized humming over sparse piano to a driving folk-rock crescendo. On \u201cLight You Leave Behind,\u201d she touches on her dad\u2019s story about sneaking into arena rock shows as a teenager. Among all the original songs is one surprise: a dreamy interpretation of Duran Duran\u2019s \u201cOrdinary World,\u201d a song she remembers hearing from the back seat of her father\u2019s car as a child and encountered again soon after he died. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The connections to Maloney\u2019s father go deeper than the songs themselves. On \u201cExploding Star\u201d and \u201cTo a Special No One,\u201d she switched from her usual Martin 00-18V and played the beginner\u2019s guitar her dad had bought near the end of his life\u2014an under-$100 Spectrum acoustic that Massachusetts luthier Trevor Healy revived and adapted as a rubber bridge guitar. \u201cI wanted to lean into its quirks and limitations rather than try to make it be a guitar that it\u2019s just not going to be,\u201d Maloney told me. \u201cI loved playing it on this record, and every night that I play it at a show, I feel closer to him.\u201d While making Exploding Star,<\/em> she even spent two days tracking in her childhood home in New Jersey, which happened to be empty and much as her parents left it decades ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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