When Woody Guthrie died at the untimely age of 55, in 1967, the pioneering folk singer left behind 28 linear feet of lyrics scrawled on, according to his archive, “tissue paper, onionskin, gift-wrap, napkins, concert programs, and even place mats”—scraps of ballads, union songs, and protest hymns for the next generation to sing. Guthrie’s prolific posthumous catalog has meant that, at the invitation of his daughter and archivist, Nora Guthrie, contemporary musicians like Billy Bragg & Wilco, Del McCoury, the Klezmatics, and the Dropkick Murphys have tried on Guthrie’s unsung lyrics over the years to find that his messages of radical humanism still fit perfectly.
To write “in the spirit of Woody Guthrie”—as Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover aspire to do on their new collaborative LP, What of Our Nature—is a different undertaking than Mermaid Avenue or Del and Woody, requiring not only creative interpretation but political imagination. Heynderickx and Conover take the task seriously. On 10 spirited tracks that address topics like mass marketing, labor history, and the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, Conover and Heynderickx affirm Guthrie’s legacy not by resurrecting his words but by renewing his commitment to songwriting as a democratic exercise.
Heynderickx and Conover first collaborated on the 2018 EP Among Horses III, an intimate, mystical jewel box showcasing their respective gifts for hypnotism. Heynderickx’s plaintive warble, which evokes folk singers like Shirley Collins, is her primary instrument; Conover’s songs unfold in incantatory, tumbling rhythms that recall the verbose pleasure of Adrianne Lenker. On Among Horses, Conover and Heynderickx’s common ground was covered in papaya trees and praying mantises, castles and ghosts—a shared vocabulary of supernatural ecology that wove their songs together like spiderweb.
Recorded directly to tape in Vermont, What of Our Nature is even earthier than its predecessor, with twinkling wind chimes, rustling hand percussion, and precise fingerpicking. Lyrically, the album returns to nature—the tongue-twisting “Boars,” especially, is a fantasia of “quiquiriqui” calls, “stag shape” runaways, and “blushfern silversage”—but the grim reapers of capitalism and colonialism are closing in. Conover and Heynderickx must now address “ticker tape accumulation” and “neoliberal sublimation,” “starvation wages” and “revolution coming round.”
These struggles aren’t new: What of Our Nature’s two most overtly political songs, both written by Conover, link current events to a pair of incidents from 1981. “Song for Alicia” recounts the undignified courtroom treatment of FALN member Alicia Rodríguez, who was imprisoned alongside nine other Puerto Rican independence activists while refusing to stand trial. “Buffalo, 1981” alludes to Reagan’s suppression of the 1981 PATCO Strike, which dealt a massive blow to American labor power. The specificity of these references is a gift for political education. But the album’s more expressionistic or metaphorical songs, though beautiful, feel atemporal and vague by contrast. Some of the overliteral proclamations sell their songwriters short: “To believe the weightless wait behind the door of salvation metaphors” is a far stronger line than “They’re just making money off of us fighting” (Heynderickx); “Montserrat money makers rooting in the rutabaga” is inarguably more interesting than “The USA hates you being poor” (Conover).
Resorting to stock phrases helps Heynderickx and Conover ensure that their message is unambiguous—a useful way to assuage uncertainty about the efficacy of art in times of crisis, a motif that recurs across What of Our Nature. In “Song for Alicia,” Conover imagines a harsh future appraisal of his output: “And when someone looks at what I’ve done/I know songs won’t seem like enough/Songs are for sure not nearly enough.” Acknowledging this doubt helps these songwriters move past it into strength. “The war’s gone long without us/Using the ammo of our tongues,” Heynderickx sings on “In Bulosan’s Words.”
Yet What of Our Nature’s most potent weapons are smelted from the ore of others. On “Song for Alicia,” Conover and Heynderickx belt Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Corretjer’s refrain “I would be Boricua even if I was born on the moon” with triumphant defiance that evokes the dual strength and vulnerability of Emmylou Harris and Conor Oberst’s blend on “Landlocked Blues.” On “In Bulosan’s Words,” Heynderickx crafts a folk protest song using lines from Filipino American poet Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. These creative forebears prove that poetry can be as effective a tool of resistance as plainspoken systemic critique; but Heynderickx and Conover, in their own words, seem less convincing. Compared to acerbic present-day folk artists like Jesse Welles, whose songs seek to meet the urgency of the moment by criticizing ICE or Netanyahu by name, Conover and Heynderickx sound slightly aimless. The targets of Conover and Heynderickx’s songs? “Men in suits,” “the wealthy,” “the USA,” and, frequently, “they.”
Bob Dylan, perhaps Woody Guthrie’s best-known acolyte, didn’t follow Guthrie to the bitter end. One of Dylan’s most haunting protest songs, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” sparks outrage and disdain for broken legal systems in a similar fashion as the third verse of “Song for Alicia.” Dylan credited Bertolt Brecht, explicitly not Guthrie, with inspiring his writing at that time. Perhaps with a different muse—one who reflects both their values and their uncanny sensibilities—Conover and Heynderickx will activate the full artistic potential of their convictions. What of Our Nature makes a very respectable start.
