Hello Out There
A Letter to Listeners
This is me in a tiny stone cottage I lived in for a year while I was finishing my last album and beginning to write songs for an EP I just recorded. You can know someone a long time and not really know them until you've seen where they live. I feel like that about album artwork: creating it is like building the town the songs live in. You can take them out of context, but you'll never really know them unless you see their hometown. That's why each of the full-length albums I've produced have really thoughtful artwork based on great photography, and give you all the lyrics. So listen away here—every song on every recording I've made is below in streaming audio, and many songs are also MP3's. Share files, download, trade, rip, and burn. But I really believe you won't get the full experience unless you've got a CD in your hand. I hope you'll decide to get something for yourself or a friend.
Peace,
Heather

P.S. Genre designations follow each song to help out the DJ's among you (Bones, my first record, was programmed alongside albums from Gillian Welch, Tracey Grammer, Kris Delmhorst, and Mary Gauthier if that helps). Booking agents should probably go straight to Mercy Mountain since it's just voice and guitar. Lyrics will go up in March. Thanks for listening.

Gargoyle Issue 49 * Spoken Word/Music Compilation, 2005
Available from Gargoyle in 2005
Gargoyle is a literary magazine I became familiar with while working at Poets & Writers in New York. Editor Richard Peabody chose the song “Mrs. D” from my album Treon’s Cut Rate for Gargoyle’s yearly winter issue, which comes with a music sampler. “Mrs. D.” is a spare, melancholy song that I had written and not yet a titled. Shortly after writing it, I read the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway, and thought, “This is what this is about.” The literary origins of the title were obviously not lost of the people selecting the songs for the journal’s annual CD…

Mrs. D (Folk Noir): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics

 

Mercy Mountain * EP, 2005
Available at Shows for $5 in 2005
Available at www.cdbaby.com for $7 + S&H
This EP is three transformations in the key of D, and it’s just voice and guitar. I was lucky enough to study for a while with musician, songwriter, and healer Jackie Tice, who reignited my interest in finger style guitar playing, and generally got my spirit back in line to play music after a rough two years. There are two new songs on this three-song EP, and a rerecording of the murder ballad “The Ballad of Anna Mae” from my first album, Bones. One review described the song as a story about "a miserable marriage, and a woman who tries (and fails) to escape her husband's bible-backed rage." The little girls are my cousins, at a wedding, and they seem to be daring you to guess what's behind their strange, not-quite smiles. They were a perfect triumverate to represent the songs.

Mercy Mountain (Gospel/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
The Ballad of Anna Mae (Country/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Ready to Rise (Blues/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics

Treon’s Cut Rate * Full Length, 2004
Available from www.cdbaby.com for $15 + S&H
Available at Shows for $10
After writing all the songs for this album, I started doing a genealogy chart of how the characters might be related, because I wanted to start writing short stories that fleshed out their lives. That turned into thinking of a way that the title and artwork could pull those generations together, and the chart is included in the design. Treon’s Cut Rate is the fictional town center that may have been a general store, pawn shop, music venue, or gathering place for the people in these stories. In reality, Treon’s Cut Rate is a corner shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I chose it simply because I loved their sign. My brother combined new photos and old public works photos to make up the beautiful design of the album. The photos include the public domain Ansel Adams photo you see all over the site, the one of the telephone pole and birds on a wire—if ever a photo captured what goes on inside my head, this is it. The cover shot is by the resident Little Red Records photographer, David Miles. It's of me in the Traylor Hotel in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Jimi Zhivago, a member of the gospel band Ollabelle and all-around musician helped me produce this album as well as my first record, Bones.

Gone (Folk Rock): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Don’t Fence Me In (Folk Rock): Stream
I’m All Right (Country Folk/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Walk Through This (Folk Rock): Stream
Windy Heart Waltz (Country Blues/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Baby Got Blue (Blues/Americana): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Mrs. D. (Folk/Pop): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Shoulda Been (Country Folk/Americana): Stream
Weather (Folk Rock): Stream
Ready to Repent (Country Folk/Americana): MP3 * Stream
Snowing in Stroudsburg Tonight (Country Folk/Americana): MP3 * Stream
Let Your Hammer Ring (Country Folk/Americana): Stream

CD Baby Top Sellers * Compilation, 2002
Out of Print
Annually, the amazing online indie record store CD Baby releases a compilation of its top-sellers, and I was lucky enough to be on it in 2002. My song “Sequoia” from my first record Bones is on here along artists like Melissa Ferrick. “Sequoia” is a story about a girl who renames herself to make herself stronger.

Sequoia (Folk Rock): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics

Bones * Full Length, 2001
Available at www.cdbaby.com for $15 + S&H
Available at shows for $10
The beginning. This is a studio album, but it’s really spare. It was five days of quick takes and playing as live as possible. It’s a ghostly thing, with hard luck characters running about in a moody landscape of acoustic guitars, dobros, and found percussion. One of the definitions of “articulate” is to articulate a skeleton, and this was my first attempt to raise characters from nothing and make them breathe. The cover shot is me walking in the woods behind the house that my mother grew up in, just like Little Red Riding Hood. The rest of the photos are of the barn on the property my dad grew up on, and other shots of rural Pennsylvania.

Sequoia (Folk Rock): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Lazarus (Folk): Stream
Opiates & Envy (Country Folk): Stream
The Ballad of Anna Mae (Country Folk): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
44 Summers (Folk): Stream
City Lullaby (Jazz): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Calling (Country Blues): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
No Rain (Folk): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics
Letter to a Lover (Folk Rock): Stream
Bones (Folk): MP3 * Stream * Lyrics  

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