Heather Maloney - Exploding Star Album Release (Night 1) at The Iron Horse on Friday, February 7 2025

Heather Maloney’s new album, Exploding Star was never intended to be released. Written after the death of her father, the songs were the most vulnerable body of work ever created by Maloney- meant and written only for her. The idea of releasing and then promoting an album went against her instincts to keep this art near and dear. Luckily for us, her closest friends and family convinced her otherwise.

Maloney was able to track for 2 days in her childhood home- recording songs, backing vocals, the crickets in the yard and even percussion played directly on the walls and floors of the house itself. The result is raw and exquisitely personal. Maloney played her father’s guitar and also played a Yamaha keyboard that she had since she was a child. Maloney’s beloved tour mates and collaborators, Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot’s velvety harmonies and arrangements encourage the songs to blossom into lush soundscapes. Exploding Star is a collection of twelve songs urgently written at the time to help ease the “greatest heartbreak” of Maloney’s life but are thankfully and transcendentally now ours as well.

But here’s another thing I’ve since found to be true about grief: it changes you. You don’t just lose someone you held dear, you also lose yourself. You lose who you were before they died, and the world as you knew it - with them in it. It takes time to get to know yourself again. It took nearly a year for me to even begin to find words & chords that came anywhere close to capturing the new (and very big) feelings that happen when someone you love is so, incredibly, gone.   - Heather