Haley Heynderickx, the folk songwriter who made going away part of the work

Haley Heynderickx

Photo: Paul Hudson / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 28, 1993 Stockton
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter

The last song on Seed of a Seed sings one line twice, almost as if Haley Heynderickx expected to be asked about it: “There’s an artistry to going away.” From her, it sounds like a defence. Her debut had turned the Portland songwriter into one of American folk’s most quietly treasured voices, the fingerpicker who could undercut her own anxiety with a joke about sour milk, and then she went silent for so long that the attention around that record had time to cool.

That silence is the key to her career, and the question it keeps raising is whether a folk singer can refuse the pace the music business sets and still be heard. Her answer so far has been to do almost the opposite of a career plan. The record that broke the silence was about protecting the self from noise. The one after it was not even hers alone, and her newest credit is on somebody else’s album.

Stockton, California, is where Heynderickx was born, on May 28, 1993, but the place that shaped her is Forest Grove, the small city west of Portland, Oregon, where she grew up in a Filipino-American household; her mother was born in the Philippines. She learned to sing in church and at family karaoke parties, then learned to play in public at Portland open mics, building a fingerstyle guitar technique that owes much to Leo Kottke and John Fahey. In person she is shy, and she has described the “sweaty imposter syndrome” that comes over her when she is asked to explain her own songs.

The songs did the explaining. Her first EP, Fish Eyes, arrived in January 2016 with four tracks that Jerad Walker of Oregon Public Broadcasting later called “so unguarded, it was almost uncomfortable to listen to.” Around the same time she began a long creative friendship with Max García Conover, a songwriter from Portland, Maine, with whom she shared the EP Among Horses III.

Making the first album nearly broke her. Heynderickx has said it took three attempts to record I Need to Start a Garden. The first, at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, Oregon, ended after a horse died during one of her songs: “I lost faith in the songs and myself.” The second, in a conventional studio, left her too worried about the hourly cost to sing freely. The third took place at Nomah Studios, a space run by friends, with Zak Kimball producing. Mama Bird Recording Co. released the album in March 2018: eight songs, thirty minutes, and a centrepiece, “Oom Sha La La”, whose lyrics cheerfully inventory spoiled groceries and include the line that gave the record its name. She described the song as partly motivational and partly a reminder not to take herself too seriously. Another track, “No Face”, was inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Stereogum had already named her an artist to watch that January; by August she was playing an NPR Tiny Desk concert, and the album holds a Metacritic score of 80.

What followed was six years without a new record, a stretch that took in a pandemic and, in AllMusic’s telling, ended only when she “somewhat reluctantly” committed to putting out new music. The single “Seed of a Seed” finally appeared in July 2024, a song she had first demoed for her friend, the singer Tré Burt, who kept asking about it for years. She called it “the last four years of my life condensed into a short tune.” The album of the same name followed on November 1, 2024, on Mama Bird again, made with producer Andrew Stonestreet and what she calls her “core jazz boy band”: Daniel Rossi on drums, Denzel Mendoza on trombone and Matthew Holmes on bass. Where the debut was mostly a woman and her guitar, these arrangements bring in drums, bass and trombone, and the subject has shifted. “Gemini” sketches the double life of a touring musician; “Redwoods (Anxious God)” longs for birdsong and gets “cellphone ring ring rings” instead. Paste gave it 8.4 out of 10, and Pitchfork heard an exploration of “internal anxieties and the wisdom that can be gleaned outside the confines of our minds.”

There is a tension in that work she has not resolved, and she seems to know it. Her songs keep warning against the attention economy, while her living depends on that economy noticing her. On What of Our Nature, the album she released with García Conover through Fat Possum Records in November 2025, her song “Mr. Marketer” turns the knife on her own trade: “The artist is selling sad nudes of herself / saying, ‘I hope that this helps.'” The record grew out of a year the two spent reading Woody Guthrie’s words and biographies, and they wrote five songs each before cutting them to tape in five days in a Vermont barn. Pitchfork called it a “spirited and serious collection of protest folk inspired by the legacy of Woody Guthrie.” Not every critic was convinced by the format. Seven Days, the Vermont weekly, found that alternating songwriters made it feel “more assembled than sculpted”, even as it praised the dark, intuitive harmonies the two voices make together.

The duo spent much of 2026 on the road with those songs, a run that took them to the Harbor Stage of the Newport Folk Festival on July 24. Meanwhile Heynderickx took on a new role. This Bed Was Made For Me, the debut album of Biita Houdei, a songwriter who opened one of her shows in 2018, was released on September 18, 2026, through Father/Daughter Records in North America and Basin Rock in Europe, and it is her first album as a producer. It was recorded over ten days in a converted garage studio in Portland with producer and engineer Sahil Ansari, and Big Thief’s Buck Meek sings on the opening track. For an artist who once could not finish her own record without starting over twice, producing a friend’s is its own small statement of confidence.

Now she is going back out alone. Her booking agency bills the tour as a rare run of solo performances after a year with García Conover. It opens on November 7 at the Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago, moves up the West Coast from San Diego with two nights at Portland’s Aladdin Theater on November 22 and 23, reaches the Bowery Ballroom in New York on December 15 and closes on December 19 at the Academy of Music in Northampton, Massachusetts. No third solo album has been announced, and nothing in her history suggests one will be rushed: the last time she went quiet, she came back with a record about why she had to.