Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover made their second collaborative record in the spirit of Woody Guthrie. From opposite corners of the country, the two songwriters spent a year sharing songs while reading Woody’s words and biographies, slowly exploring a patchwork of Americanism to see where their stories fit. García Conover, half-Puerto Rican, and Heynderickx, half-Filipina, found themselves with this collection of music about the legacy of colonialism, generational identity, commercialism, and the slippery target of addressing social equity in song. Heynderickx’s precise, delicate eloquence met García Conover’s vivid, angular poetics in a barn in Vermont, where this record was recorded directly to tape in five days. With guitars, voices, and some found percussion, they played the record straight through, channeling Woody’s union of spontaneity, sweetness, and defiance.
The two alternate songwriting contributions on this record: García Conover’s ‘Song for Alicia’ tells the story of Puerto Rican independence activist Alicia Rodríguez; Heynderickx’s ‘In Bulosan’s Words’ responds with the poetry of Filipino-American writer and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. In ‘Cowboying,’ García Conover looks at the people around him, and in ‘Mr. Marketer’ Heynderickx looks at the systems around her. In ‘Red River Dry,’ she looks at her lineage, and in ‘Buffalo, 1981’ he looks at his. In ‘Fluorescent Light,’ Heynderickx looks away from the brightness of her phone, while in ‘This Morning I Am Born Again,’ García Conover looks to the vivid words of Woody Guthrie. In ‘to each their dot’ she writes of the collective tension all around, while in ‘Boars’ he writes about the spirited friendship between them. Together, all of these songs reveal a conversation between the two, sung in their respective styles, each coloring between the lines left by the other.
Max García Conover writes songs in his attic in Bath, Maine. He’s toured across the US and Europe and he releases records both independently and through the Barcelona-based label Son Canciones. In between songs he tells stories, and his storytelling has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and Stories From The Stage.
