Heather Maloney

Were you at Woodstock? Joni Mitchell was not; she opted for a guest spot on the “Dick Cavett Show” instead. And yet her song “Woodstock” — “We are stardust/We are golden” — may be marked in history as the boomers’ theme song.

I hosted a house concert last month featuring a singer-songwriter from Massachusetts, Heather Maloney, and if I’d closed my eyes it could have been Joni Mitchell in my living room. She performed with an indie folk quartet, Darlingside, four a cappella singers who met at Williams College and have built on their voices with violin, cello, mandolin, guitar and other instruments. As they were packing up, I made the Joni Mitchell comparison and suggested that Darlingside could have fun with the harmonies of the Crosby Stills Nash and Young version of “Woodstock.” Then the day after Thanksgiving I got a gift in my email: Heather and the band had covered Joni Mitchell’s song — harmonies and all. - New York Times

As rich it was, the concert might have felt incomplete without its opening act: Signature Sounds label mate Heather Maloney. Armed only with a guitar and a voice from on high, the New Jersey native — now based in Northampton, Massachusetts — was a study in contrasts. Her unique, sometimes-quirky songwriting concerned itself one moment with simple pleasures (“Nightstand Drawer”), morphing the next into an ode to pathos (“Dirt and Stardust,” a fan favorite). With delicate restraint at her fingertips, she told stories of old friendships (“Hey, Serena”) and, in the evocative “1855,” of an immeasurable love captured in a single photograph. In this song her playing was most alive, like ocean waves lapping over one another before a storm.

Despite tempting comparisons to coffee house queens Aimee Mann or Ani DiFranco, Maloney’s closest analogue is perhaps Joni Mitchell, a point confirmed by her heavenly version of the chanteuse’s classic “Woodstock.” Even more remarkable was her closer, “No Shortcuts.” Hearing this Motown-inflected anthem emanating powerfully from her petite frame to the sole accompaniment of the audience’s stomping and clapping left us fully primed for the sunbursts that followed. Like a good novelist, she followed her voice and thoughts to their logical endpoints, leaving us nonetheless wanting more. - Cornell Daily Sun

As an aspiring singer, Heather Maloney crammed an ambitious range of academic approaches into her head. Then she got out of her own way and started over.

The New Jersey native was a semester away from completing a two-year music degree focusing on operatic singing, she says, while pursuing private lessons in both classical Indian and improvisational jazz vocals. Then she was “hit over the head” with the impulse to drop it all and go meditate.
So she did.

“I sort of let it go and said I’m just going to drop this sound thing altogether and move into a space of silence,” says Maloney, 27, in a mid-tour phone call from Pittsburgh.

She found her silent space at a center devoted to Buddhist meditation in Barre, where she picked up a job as vegetarian cook and spent nearly three years refining a daily meditation practice that would sometimes require days at a time without speaking. - Boston Globe