Haley Heynderickx’s first album as producer is Biita Houdei’s Persian-rooted folk debut

Haley Heynderickx has spent years as one of American folk’s most quietly revered songwriters, the Portland voice whose records get passed between friends like a secret. Her first turn in the producer’s chair, though, is not her own music. It belongs to Biita Houdei, the Missouri-raised songwriter once known as LéPonds, who has now made a debut album that reaches back to her Persian heritage while living firmly in the American present. It is called This Bed Was Made For Me, and it also carries a guest spot from Big Thief’s Buck Meek.

The friendship behind it runs about eight years deep. According to the album notes, the two met when Houdei opened a Heynderickx show in 2018, and before recording they went on a writing retreat in rural Oregon, each sleeping in a small camper. That closeness followed them into a “small nest of a studio” in Portland: a converted garage with orange shag rugs, humming beer signs, lava lamps, tape and vintage reverb plates. The sessions ran ten full days back to back, with producer and engineer Sahil Ansari completing the team.

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The name change is part of the story. Biita, pronounced “bee-tah”, means “unique” in Farsi and was a gift from her aunt. “I proudly take this name,” she says in the album notes. “It makes me feel that much closer to my Persian heritage.” Across fourteen songs and close to 45 minutes, that lineage meets a restless American map: several songs were written in California’s Topanga Canyon while wildfires burned nearby, far from the Ozark home she missed, and she now lives in the Catskills, near Woodstock, New York.

Opener “The Ground Here” is where Buck Meek enters, his guitar and voice woven around hers as the song travels from a scorched California summer to the rivers of the Ozarks. “Night Fright”, the single that now has an official video, is the record’s centerpiece, a relationship that begins tangled and ends in bloom. The track that follows it is a short, ghostly echo, the same refrain sung by Houdei and Heynderickx together and then warped by Ansari.

There is a handmade logic to the whole project. Houdei sewed a patch for every song during the making of the album, and the finished quilt became the front cover. She asks listeners to give the record time rather than skim it through playlists; many of her favorite albums, she says, did not reveal themselves at once.

Before this, Houdei released several independent albums as LéPonds and toured with artists including Jeff Tweedy, Natalie Prass and Black Belt Eagle Scout. This Bed Was Made For Me came out on September 18 through Basin Rock in Europe and Father/Daughter Records in North America, with vinyl and CD editions.

Next comes her first European tour, organized by Vienna-based Rola Music and presented by ByteFM and Cute & Dangerous. It opens in the UK on October 10 in Todmorden, with Birmingham and London to follow, then crosses the continent through Freiburg, Rotterdam, Cologne, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, among other stops, before closing in Vienna on November 4. Several of the smaller German dates are free entry.

Tags: Big Thief, Biita Houdei, Buck Meek, folk albums, Haley Heynderickx, Rola Music

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