Picture the scene. Seven long summer days in rural Spain, hot breeze amongst papery leaves, terracotta and whitewashed stucco, snoozing dogs and lethargic horses, twitching against flies as they scratch around in the yellowing vegetation. This was the location of this special collaboration, an organic farm “in the middle of nowhere in Spain” where Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover were brought together for a week by Barcelona label Son Canciones to write and record an EP. The result is Among Horses III, six songs written and performed as a duo, each of the pair taking the lead for three songs each.
Both artists bring their considerable talents to the project. Heynderickx continues the rich and ultimately soothing narratives that we appreciated so much on her album I Need to Start a Garden, which we described as a record “about growth and the hope of new beginnings [that] doesn’t shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Conover too continues where he left off with his solo work, which we summed up previously as music which “conjures a vast American landscape, positioning the narrator as a tiny speck upon its great dusty plains, every sunset and moonbeam charging a burning nostalgia, a yearning for someplace to call home.”
Opener ‘Slow Talkin’’ is a twirling folk song, complete with Heynderickx’s now signature natural poetry. “Was it the glory days or just a heat wave,” she sings with her probing emotion. “You got a promise land made of quick sand / You got a slow dancin’ praying mantis /Stuck inside this jar / Staring at the wall.” The track’s pseudo-chorus gives us the first taste of the two voices working together—joining forces to make a compelling rhythm and energy.
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‘Francis’ is spiked and spurred, gathering in intensity despite its hushed nature, like a silent midnight horse ride from deep in the American West. As its title suggests, ‘Mother’ is a song for Heynderickx’s mother, her Asian heritage referenced with beautiful, subtle grace through lines like “Land filled with pears, and apricot hues / The lands filled with mangoes and papayas blooming.” The track is plaintive and moving, the vocals breaking with something like desperation as they detail the sense of never quite belonging in homes old and new.
The Conover-penned ‘Little Wind’ might be the record’s most evocative moment, Heynderickx’s painting vivid pictures of the Catalonian countryside as she again invokes imagery of plants and nature to approach the same rhythms and cycles we experience in our lives.
I wish that I had stayed
In that river house with you
Pulled away the weeds
And let the wild roses bloom
But all the hanging plums
Someday will go sour
Little wind I’m with you in the roadside flowers
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“It took hold of me,” Heynderickx sings on ‘The Park’, “I saw a grown man crying.” The song frames her as a silent observer, a vicarious tale of feeling that situates the songwriter as a conduit for outside forces. And, while ‘Crow Song’ re-positions back to the personal perspective, a similar sensation persists. Because, whether writing confessions about themselves or imagined fictions about others, the genius of both Heynderickx and Conover is their ability to draw a relatable emotion from their subject matter—tapping into a universal sense of nostalgia and longing and presenting it back to us, shaping and polished into its most gleaming form.
You can get Among Horses III now from the Son Canciones Bandcamp page.