The Michigan Daily — michigandaily. com
Arts
4 — Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Haley Heynderickx talks music, honesty and change
Seeing Haley Heynderickx perform
live will change your conception of her
music. You will realize that, all this
time, she has not been trying to give
you the answers: she is trying to ask
the right questions. Even her tone —
lilting, light, turning the ends of her
phrases up in a comedic manner — often
implies
uncertainty.
Heynderickx’s
music allows listeners to be confidently
uncertain, resting in a place of comfort
with the unknown. This open-hearted
approach and the honesty with which
her songs flow in performance remove
some of the mysterious sheen that
accompanies only listening to an artist
through earbuds. This connective
experience can also be painfully
stripping for the artist. In a phone
interview with The Michigan Daily,
Heynderickx spoke on this experience.
“Music has always been a therapy for
me, which is why touring through
2018 to 2020 was pretty difficult for
me because it’s kind of like putting
my therapy on display every night,”
Heynderickx said. “And now, writing
comes from a place of meditation and
gratitude.”
On a cold April night at the Ark,
fans
watching
these
raw
songs
performed were able to join together
in this gratitude. It is not at all lost on
Heynderickx how her music, written
as an extension of herself and her
emotions,
sometimes
paradoxically
changes the honesty with which
people see her. “Sometimes, I feel (the
audience) talking to me,” Heynderickx
said. “They have more of an idea of me
than noticing the person that’s in front
of them.” Her music is clearly written
from a place deep inside of her, one that
she sees connecting to the very cores of
other people. “I guess I’m beginning to
see the changes (in) perception (of me
by my audience) over time, but I also
know it’s just reflections of how they’ve
experienced music,” Heynderickx said.
“Honestly, when people come up to me,
I see them talking to themselves, talking
to ideas that they’ve had with music, and
I get to view a weird medium vehicle of
them reflecting back to themselves.”
She spoke with the audience in a
friendly, shy, slightly practiced manner,
watching their faces sitting in the dark
just outside her stage circle of light.
Accompanied by her band of friends,
with Abbey Blackwell on upright bass
and Haley Freedlund on trombone, she
seemed more at ease with herself and
the crowd. “I don’t know how to write
a love song, yet,” she joked at one point.
She’s right — there is no way to always
know how to write about love. But the
way she writes and plays often feels
naturally imbued with love — love for
the subjects of her songs, love for the
writing process, love for her guitar. Her
songs are full of seemingly little things:
pomegranates, park benches, bugs. This
collection creates an image of attention
to and care for the world. Her advice for
musicians falls in line with this, as she
finds wonder in “draw(ing) in as much
as one can from the present and (from)
the lessons at hand that kind of peek
out towards you.” Indeed, her biggest
joys in music come from these small
moments. “My favorite part of being a
musician is when I somehow end up on
a friend’s porch, and we are jamming,”
Heynderickx
said.
“Drinking
a
beverage that matches the weather. We
are getting to stare at nature and make
music at the same time.”
This side of music-making is one
she is slowly returning to. “Music was
the only thing that made me feel sane,”
Heynderickx said. “So I’ve just been
following that ever since. But now it’s
made an ironic turn of sometimes, music
has been the thing that has not made
me feel sane. And I’ve had to now turn
again to other sources, and it’s kind of a
relief to catch myself in the cycle of life.
Life requires so many different types of
balancing, tending to relationships and
home and your body. I think I’ve just
loved music so much. I wanted to pour
my whole life into it, and it hurt me in
many different realms outside of it. So
now I turn again.” Her speaking voice
has a lilt to it; no matter the gravity of
what she is telling you, there is always
an undercurrent of hope.
This healing seems to be coming
to her in the form of more communal
music-making, as per her wish. “I’ve
been a little too self-isolating over the
last few years,” Heynderickx said.
“Sometimes by force of nature, which
happens to all of us, but I feel like I’m
coming out from the rock I put myself
under, and I’m excited to collaborate
with more people in the future.” This
community she found in music is
present in her newest project. “I’m very
lucky that my friends of the Westerlies
and I had a little writing residency in
January of this year, and we were in
Northampton, Massachusetts. They’re
a brilliant four-piece horn section,
and the four of them dissected some
of my songs and transposed them. We
worked on them for a couple of days
and recorded them live to an audience,
and I’m excited to have those songs be
put out in the world later this year. I’ve
been quite tired of myself. I was just
singing too long with a guitar by myself.
So to have four talented horn players
around me that are also my friends has
been very healing and makes me excited
for more collaboration stations in the
future.” The joy with which she spoke
was palpable.
ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI
Daily Arts Writer
Natasha Lyonne gives time a run for its money on season two of ‘Russian Doll’
Time travel. What a concept.
It’s inspired countless iconic
films and appears in everything
from “Doctor Who” to “Back to the
Future.” I mean, who can really
resist the dual aesthetic appeal of
a period piece and sci-fi thrown
together into one? But perhaps
more importantly, as a plot device,
time travel holds the creative
capacity to accomplish something
we all fixate on from time to
time: the elusive impossibility of
somehow changing the past. In
season two of Netflix’s “Russian
Doll,” Nadia (Natasha Lyonne,
“Orange Is the New Black”) gets
the golden opportunity to do just
that. Or so she thinks.
The question that drove Nadia’s
existence in the first season was
pretty much: “How do I stop
dying?” But in the aftermath
of escaping a time loop and the
show expanding its horizons both
spatially and temporally, she’s left
to tackle the resulting conundrum:
“How do I go on living?”
Aligning
with
the
show’s
casually
chaotic
tone
we’ve
grown quite familiar with, Nadia
randomly discovers a wormhole
on the 6 Train that transports her
back to 1982. An offhand remark
she makes about being a “time
prisoner,” rather than a “time
traveler,” becomes frighteningly
fitting once she realizes she’s
not just stuck in the 80s, but also
trapped inside the body of her
mother, Lenora (Chloë Sevigny,
“The Girl from Plainville”), who
is currently pregnant with, you
guessed it, Nadia. (Get it? Like a
literal “Russian doll”? Yeah okay,
I’ll stop.)
Unfazed
as
ever,
Nadia’s
escapades into the past begin to
take on a mission of their own,
even as she finds herself unable to
control the train’s sporadic nature
or the universe’s enigmatic agenda
that sends her bouncing between
the respective time periods and
geographic locations of her mother
and grandmother’s life. She quickly
resolves to recover the family
fortune her mother lost in 1982 and
effectively change the course of her
life.
Although Nadia has undergone
some
serious
character
development by the end of the first
season, no amount of premature
grappling with mortality could’ve
prepared her for the possibility
of losing her godmother, Ruth
(Elizabeth Ashley, “Stagecoach”).
There’s a passion to Lyonne’s
performance, an inimitable energy
that she carries (maybe it’s the hair,
who knows?) that makes Nadia
witnessing the inevitability of
Ruth’s trajectory this season all the
more heartbreaking. The addition
of Annie Murphy (“Schitt’s Creek”)
as a young Ruth in the 80s is
practically the nail in the coffin.
In any decade, Ruth’s level-headed
presence effectively offsets the
whirlwind of chaos that seems to
follow Nadia wherever she goes,
a role that was previously held by
our resident voice of reason, Alan
(Charlie Barnett, “Chicago Fire”).
Even though his appearances were
rather infrequent, and his narrative
felt rather sidelined and disjointed
at times in comparison to Nadia’s,
the few moments they did have
together were pure magic. The
stark contrast in their respective
processing of paralleled events is a
key aspect of the show’s brilliance.
At times, the weirdness of
“Russian Doll” may come off as
a purely aesthetic ploy to keep
up with the ever-idiosyncratic
Lyonne herself, but beneath the
surface, there are so many layers
contributing to the richly eccentric
experience that is watching this
show. Its narrative often reads like
an intricate puzzle box of sorts,
each word of dialogue meticulously
chosen, every reference a double
entendre to mull over. Horse
(Brendan Sexton III, “Don’t Breathe
2”),
for
example,
inexplicably
refers to Nadia as “Nora” in 2022,
well before she takes a joy-ride
in her mom. The intentionality
of its soundtrack also works on
multiple levels. The season opens
to Nadia coolly walking to Depeche
Mode’s “Personal Jesus” like a
deity resurrected, descends into
the distorted cadence of Bauhaus’s
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” for her first
warped venture into 1982 and
closes out on Pink Floyd’s “Shine
On You Crazy Diamond” as she
contentedly makes peace with her
past.
Like all perfect things, this
second installment of “Russian
Doll” was never going to be able
to top that first season, but at its
heart, it’s still a darkly funny and
ambitious show. As someone who’s
rewatched it more times than I can
count, “Russian Doll” is something
of a rabbit hole that you can’t help
but get lost in. I don’t know where
(or when) the show is headed next,
but I can rest assured knowing
that Nadia’s got the survival
instincts of a “cock-ah-roach,” and
that everything Natasha Lyonne
touches turns to gold.
SERENA IRANI
Daily Arts Writer
Photo and design credit Jeff Andersen, courtesy of Lucky Bird Media
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