Review: Heather Maloney Mourns and Celebrates Her Father on ‘Exploding Star’

“Are you floating in the cosmos, finally free from time/ While I’m down here on the highway looking for signs?” asks Heather Maloney in the title track from her new album, Exploding Star, over the light 6/8 strum of her guitar. The lyrics address her father in the wake of his passing, and build to this arresting image in the chorus: “I emptied out your house like a slowly exploding star/ I scattered you around, and now you’re all spread out.”

Exploding Star, Heather Maloney (Signature Sounds)Songwriters often process intense personal experiences through writing, and Maloney responded to the loss of her father with a flood of songs. She initially planned to keep this music private, but friends convinced her to share it, and we are lucky they did. The resulting album is a beautiful and emotionally deep piece of work—suffused with sadness yet ultimately conveying a feeling of celebration of familial love.

Maloney, based in western Massachusetts, has been a standout singer-songwriter since releasing her debut album, Time and Pocket Change, back in 2011—she’s a gifted vocalist with a folk-pop sensibility and a poet’s eye for language, akin to such artists as Anaïs Mitchell and Dar Williams. For Exploding Star, Maloney teamed up with her longtime friend Don Mitchell, of the harmony-driven band Darlingside, as producer, and the duo High Tea (Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Elliot) helped build subtle, layered arrangements of voices and instruments. The supporting vocals are prominent and gorgeous throughout the album—more like a chamber choir than conventional backup singing. 

Images of Maloney’s father pop up across the songs. In the expansive opening track, “Labyrinth in the Weeds,” she portrays an early memory of him mowing paths through an overgrown field for the kids to play in, as the music builds from harmonized humming over sparse piano to a driving folk-rock crescendo. On “Light You Leave Behind,” she touches on her dad’s story about sneaking into arena rock shows as a teenager. Among all the original songs is one surprise: a dreamy interpretation of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World,” a song she remembers hearing from the back seat of her father’s car as a child and encountered again soon after he died. 

The connections to Maloney’s father go deeper than the songs themselves. On “Exploding Star” and “To a Special No One,” she switched from her usual Martin 00-18V and played the beginner’s guitar her dad had bought near the end of his life—an under-$100 Spectrum acoustic that Massachusetts luthier Trevor Healy revived and adapted as a rubber bridge guitar. “I wanted to lean into its quirks and limitations rather than try to make it be a guitar that it’s just not going to be,” Maloney told me. “I loved playing it on this record, and every night that I play it at a show, I feel closer to him.” While making Exploding Star, she even spent two days tracking in her childhood home in New Jersey, which happened to be empty and much as her parents left it decades ago. 

In the album closer, “Leave It to Them,” recorded in her old living room, Maloney sings over soft fingerpicking, “There are no words I could say that measure up to the size of the space/ Left behind in your wordless wake.” While songs may feel inadequate to fully evoke a parent who has passed on, with Exploding Star Maloney gives us a moving reminder that those who’ve helped shape us never really leave.

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.

Jeffrey Pepper RodgersJeffrey Pepper Rodgers, founding editor of Acoustic Guitar, is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter, Beyond Strumming, and other books and videos for musicians. In addition to his ongoing work with AG, he offers live workshops for guitarists and songwriters, plus video lessons, song charts, and tab, on Patreon.