Arlington, VA singer-songwriter Heddy Edwards releases “The other side of town” on March 27th – the second single from her debut EP “The Other Side of Hell is a Heaven So Delicate.” It’s only her sixth song ever, which is worth sitting with for a moment. She stopped writing for ten years after an early rejection convinced her music wasn’t her path, then rebuilt from scratch during the pandemic, set herself a goal to release something before turning 30, and made it. The song was produced and mixed by Alan Day of Four Year Strong at his Massachusetts home studio and mastered by Jay Maas. Lyrically, it’s a surrealist suburban gothic story – Lynchian in its imagery, built around a town split by class and the way memory haunts those who wronged someone on the other side of it.
This song transcends genres or any boxes one might attempt to put it in. It’s a true piece of art, meaning it’s more than the sum of its parts – a beautiful marriage between sound and storytelling. You can really feel the intention of the artist in every choice, from the way the warm synth layers sound to the gradual and masterful gradient of dynamics that builds up over the course of the song. That gradient is an absolute must to tell such a story of the deep spiritual yearning for meaning and unity that we all intrinsically have.
The Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” gallop that kicks in for the final chorus is a bold call, and Heddy acknowledges the nervousness around using it deliberately. It pays off. The key change she unknowingly wrote while composing a cappella gives the song a jarring, darker quality that no amount of deliberate crafting would have produced. For a sixth-ever release, the instincts here are striking. I will be on the lookout for the drop of the full EP and I hope you will too.
