Maggie Herron’s ‘My Story In Song’ Traces Heartbreak, and Recovery, in 12 Moving Tracks
The five-time Na-Hoku-winning piano vocalist picks up the pieces the only way she knows how, through her own unique jazz-to-folkloric music
(The following is the second run-through of my review. The first draft took me three hours and was almost completed before Microsoft Word decided to wipe it clean, forcing me to start over.)
How do you deal with the sudden, tragic death of your firstborn, only daughter, your best friend and soul mate, one-half of a successful songwriting duo?
If you’re five-time, Nā-Hōkū-Hanohano-winning pianist/singer Maggie Herron, you absorb the heartbreak through music, you pour every ounce of care into every note, and you try to move on, one song after another, picking up fond, bittersweet memories and gaining a newfound sense of self and strength you never thought you had.
The Big Island-based artist also tends to her garden, hikes, and travels back and forth to Waikiki’s Lewers Lounge at the famed Halekulani Hotel to sustain her art and her purpose in steady gigs with other local musicians, introducing visiting residents and tourists to her voluminous voice, heartfelt phrasing, and more than a passing gift for musical languages, from classical to folk, rock, and jazz.
Her seventh album, My Story In Song (Herron Song Records), is set for a Feb. 7th release, and features 12 songs — a mix of originals, four of them with long-time songwriting partner, daughter Dawn Herron, and covers — reflecting quite an experiential, musical journey worthy of the cinematic: formal recitals, an Interlochen Center for the Arts scholarship at age 14, hitching rides ‘cross-country before landing in a small commune near Washington’s Olympic National Rainforest, serenading fellow travelers on a piano donated by a bunch of local loggers, and eventually making it to paradise (Hawaii) to hone her craft.
Herron enlists the backing of a host of musicians across the globe to fill up the leftover spaces of her aching heart and extend the value of that voice, a throaty, willowy wonder on the verge of shattering — or gathering strength.
Piano and organ, drums and bass heartbeats, horns, harmonies, and votive candles strung up around compelling, wandering feeds…percussionists John Ferraro, Alex Acuña, and Dan Schnelle, bassists David Enos and Darek Oles, pianists Bill Cunliffe, Romain Collin, and Mitch Forman, guitarists Larry Koonse, John Storie, and Grant Geissman, a horn and string section, and vocal arrangement/harmonies from Mark Kibble (Take 6)…all help usher in a new beginning for Herron.
Much of the album is doused in the sorrowful, ruminative lower registers of the artist’s naturally sunken, exquisitely-shredded voice…grace in solitude.
But the opening track, “Devil’s in the Details,” goes against that plaintive, river of sorrows with a rousing celebration of big-band, hand-waving ragtime-blues, a proper ode to the bright star that was Herron’s lyrically-clever daughter Dawn.
“When I listen to the album, the music has a sort of undertone of gravitas,” Herron admitted in a press release for the project. “I’ve written some cheeky blues tunes, but Dawn was really the one who brought the levity. She was naturally a more fun person than I ever was. She was a comedian, literally part of a comedy ensemble group.”
The two of them wrote this upbeat number about a philandering lover, with short and sweet, flyaway indictments that would fit right into the post-war 1940s era.
“A little this, a little that.
You came home late,
Put out the cat.
And in your sleep,
You called a name,
But it’s not mine,
Hey! What’s your game?”
“No More Regrets” sinks into the sad, lonely, back-and-forth blues of old, revealed by bittersweet, pointed lyrics Herron lets go of in dribs and drabs that never sounded so inky-deep and silky-smooth (Geissman’s smoking-hot, why-why-why? guitar).
“Wish I could just forget
No more sadness,
No strife,
No more regrets.”
When Herron fixes on a subject in song, as she unwaveringly does on her top-flight signatures, “Modern Day Angel” and “Density” — dedicated to and inspired by daughter Dawn — she imbues a remarkable specificity to it that is uniquely her own, and somehow made uniquely one with a florid bandwidth of interlacing, instrumental music that only enhances feeling into enlightened, spiritual permanence, a well-worn bulwark from irreparable suffering.
“When we stopped at the intersection,
And the homeless waved their signs,
She would hand out bottled water,
Where they all camped in a line.
She did not subscribe to gossip,
To prejudice, unkindness.
She was a modern-day angel,
Loud, outlandish, and perfect.”
It’s the kind of song a neighbor might write on a sleepless night after a profound act of kindness, but with Herron’s classical-to-folk-to-jazz touch.
“Modern Day Angel” — a stand-out, stand-alone gem — takes its gospel flight, too, with Kibble’s background vocal harmonies and the light fixtures of a confluence of flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, soprano sax (Andrew Neu arrangement).
“She touched many lives. And as the song took shape, I thought of other iconic women who were humanitarians and inspiring,” Herron continued.
“Density” — another gem — shows off Herron’s underrated, often-overlooked ability to unearth quiet realizations in everyday chores and observations, with that laser-focused specificity.
She carves out memory and memorable, rippling music, folklore and fable, inspiration and resolution, accompanied blithesomely by Bob Sheppard on sax, out of an analogy in transporting a “two-ton boulder,” made of feldspar and quartz, from the quarry to her garden…equating the rock with her anchor.
“The rock is now my anchor,
Where I sit and view the sea.
If only you were here, to replace
My heart’s growing density.
So I sit and contemplate life’s unpredictability,
Yes, I sit on this two-ton rock
That could easily crush me.”
Back to the blues, B.B. King style, in “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” a cover by Will Jennings and Nesbert Hooper, giving the artist a little breathing room and time to shine just telling someone else’s tale of a wasted life in Vegas chasing the wrong kind of love.
Geissman casually assumes King’s role in a nanoparticle, search-and-destroy solo in and around Herron’s take-charge, bye-the-bye vocals.
“Alone Too Long” returns to the bluesy pining ballad of Herron’s tempest, Kibble’s lilting, almost-Christmassy background vocalese, sighs and wonders, and the vocalist making the most of her luxurious time, savoring the amplitude of love’s careless embrace, holding onto a fading memory…all the while watching, through her voice, those memories slip through her fingers.
Pianist Romain Collin sculpts a little straight-ahead jazz shooter out of small talk in a solo to complete Herron’s unrequited thoughts.
“The Big Seduction,” about trying to make it big in L.A., continues the redolent blues in a faster-paced, medium tempo, as if headed somewhere big and important. Horns pipe up and cascade in a spiking cathedral of illusory solstice, as Herron places her illuminating enunciations — crooning and scatting and double-meaning with the brassy tributaries — in all the right curvatures.
Just as in “Density,” where she turns a boulder in her garden into an anchor following an emotional loss, she connects with an astute analogy here, comparing L.A. to an unworthy lover.
“You try to live a dream,
Where you are the star.
No matter where you go,
You’ll never get very far.
‘Cause you found a lover
Who doesn’t love you.
It never feels like one-on-one.
When you fall for
The Big Seduction,
You try to get there,
But you never come.”
The way the instruments coincide, everyone shooting their shot, before finally leveling off in an unceremonious heap, is just as apt.
Maggie and Dawn’s “Footsteps,” “Consider My Love,” and “Sweet Lullaby” remind listeners of what was lost, in the dynamic music and the precious life.
Together, the mother-daughter team touch the greatness of every one of these songs’ innate melodies, longing to be freed, seen, and shared, hitting their pulse points from piano to quavering voice.
“Footsteps” plays as a kind of end, a reset, a full circle of life, death, and rebirth…what it feels like to get over the seven stages of grief to recovery — in all its emotional glory.
Sublimely musical, sublimely hers.
“And that’s when it comes,
A clear memory,
Of places I’ve been,
Things I have seen.
And every place that I’ve found,
Is perfect and true,
And I’m happiest here
Just being with you.”
Herron doesn’t hide behind the piano or the perfect voice. She lets her guard down a little, which the listener can sense a beat before the wavering high note, as if remembering her daughter’s smile and embrace suddenly, the truer and better for it.
Credit to guest pianist Romain Collin for elevating Herron’s compelling vocal unease, floating there like the winds of change she sings of…wanting to become the second voice.
“Consider My Love” feels intensely intimate, as if pulled from either Herron’s diary, of a love so tender and true, stuck between the pages of an adolescent’s idyllic, romanticized past.
The lyrics seem born from Herron’s piano hands, caressing each tender note in a snow flurry of sepia-toned, half-mast nostalgia, echoed by Bob Sheppard’s soprano sax.
“He found blossoms
While out walking.
‘Consider these love,’
He said…”
Love personified, encased in Herron and Sheppard’s unfinished focal points.
“Sweet Lullaby” brings back Mark Kibble’s harmonious bass-choir vocalese, a soft, drifting waft of heavenly music to sleep and dream to, applicable to both mother and child, grown with children of her own, and of course, a fine testament — better than any other — from this mother to child, gone but never forgotten.
The three-minute-24-second tune comes and goes in waves, wrapped up in cotton candy rainbows and waltzes with beloved bears and Barbie dolls, “and checking your closet, just to make sure.”
What a curious cover, originally from Mexico-City-born/NY-based jazz chanteuse Magos Herrera and Madrid-born guitarist Javier Limón’s 2014 acoustic release, “Dawn.”
Adapted in memory of her Dawn, Herron’s rendition combines the multi-threaded, Latin filagree of Limón’s buttery unraveling through John Storie/Larry Koonse’s fleshy-taut fingers and Acuña’s symbiotic, percussive Morse code, with the vocalist’s hushed allegories.
Herron adds a velvety lushness, perhaps the choral sea to Herrera’s spare, desert landscape in an entirely different interpretation, both universal, yet uniquely personal through the person and persons they’ve deeply loved and let go.
An awesome capture, and my favorite song, after “Density” and “Modern Day Angel.” Both versions.
Master-classical-violinist-turned-gypsy-jazz-musician Duane Padilla, who performs with Herron at Lewers Lounge often, turns in a string arrangement — with Rachel Handman (violins, viola) and Daniel Frankhuizen (cello) — of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah” so delicate and fine that the listener could almost feel the tapestry of pain and resurrection tearing apart and stitched back together.
Herron’s in a class of her own, overflowing with the riches of her classical-folk-jazz origins/influences, able to loosely translate her heroes and dreams into this cover about the wretched human condition, and the last remaining vestiges of hope…through the high and low notes she hits with weary satisfaction, and a gossamer piano send-off worthy of every concerto in every recital hall.
“Love is not a victory march,
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah…
And it’s not a cry that you hear at night,
It’s not someone who’s seen the light.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”
And you know in the end that she’s really lived this, through and through. She’s made Cohen’s single from his 1984 album, Various Positions, into her own mantra.
Because this is more than a song, a record for her. This is her, laid bare, in the process of healing, moving on, tying the music and lyrics of the final track/cover together with just a little divine inspiration.
For Dawn.
It’s her resurrection, after all.
Maggie Herron’s ‘My Story In Song’ Traces Heartbreak, and Recovery, in 12 Moving Tracks
Sensitive writing about beautiful music Carol! Thank you much. I am so looking forward to this album release...your words will facilitate a much deeper, richer listening...