In one of the final stops of her autumn tour, folk singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx performed at World Cafe Live’s Music Hall in Philadelphia, an intimate venue in University City. The concert served as a showcase for her sophomore album, Seed of a Seed, released just two weeks earlier on Nov. 1st. Heynderickx treated the audience on Nov. 15 to a full performance of the new album, alongside cherished favorites from her debut album, and even an unreleased song requested by an audience member.
The night’s opener was Kalia Vandever, a trombonist and composer from Hawaii, who studied at Juilliard and is now based in New York. Vandever’s set was stripped back; she sat on a folding chair, with only her laptop and trombone. She played mostly instrumental pieces, many of which were from her debut solo album, We Fell In Turn, released in 2023. In between sonorous and meditative songs, Vandever paused to talk about their significance, mentioning a spiritual experience she had with a waterfall back home on the Big Island that inspired her composition of one song in particular.
Heynderickx and her band came out promptly at 9 pm and began with “Gemini,” the first song of the album, which she called “an angsty song about being indecisive in your 20s.” After the first couple of songs, she introduced her band, asking each member to share their name and a fun fact about themselves. The group’s closeness was apparent from their banter; it felt like watching a group of friends interact, as they shared stories from their time on the road and spoke of their lives in Portland, Oregon.
Known for her aversion to social media and technology, Heynderickx focuses her music on finding solace in nature. The song “Redwoods (Anxious God),” which Heynderickx introduced as being about “talking to trees,” features lines such as, “Well, I couldn’t believe what the walnut tree and nettle leaf told me, that man and bird had used to sing, well now the only man here’s cell phone ring, ring, rings.”
Heynderickx herself is reserved and soft-spoken, letting her music speak for itself. She expressed her gratitude to the audience multiple times, thanking everyone for coming out to see her on a Friday night, saying “I feel like I’m more of a Tuesday or Thursday night kind of concert.” Indeed, the concert was peaceful and the crowd was respectfully quiet for most of the night, letting Heynderickx’s wonderfully melodic and rich voice carry throughout the room.
Towards the end of the show, she warned the audience that she wasn’t planning on doing an encore, opting to be upfront and say that there were only three more songs left. When she and her band began playing “The Bug Collector,” which she referred to as “that song,” the audience cheered and began singing along collectively. She ended her set with “Oom Sha La La,” the namesake of her 2018 debut album, I Need to Start a Garden. During the refrain, “I need to start a garden,” the audience shouted the line along with Heynderickx, jumping up and down, in a moment of shared catharsis. It was the perfect end to a beautiful show, ending on a high note of gratitude, love, and community, as the audience filtered out of the room and back into the streets of Philadelphia still carrying the warmth of the performance with them.
