A short, sweet collection of low-key but confidently assured songs from Aberdeen-via-London singer-songwriter, Heff VanSaint.

Release Date:  4^th October 2024

Label: Self Release

Formats: Digital

an artist on a mission

Aberdeen-born, London-based singer-songwriter, Heff VanSaint is an artist on a mission.  Through her songs, she expresses her life experiences, particularly those that she has accumulated as a young creative, living through challenging times, in her adopted manor of East London.  Heff cites Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young as formative influences, as well as artists with androgynous imagery, such as St Vincent, Fank Ocean, Prince and Bowie.  Through her songs, also, she seeks to combine queer culture with themes that are universal and part of the human condition.  She is particularly passionate about achieving more visibility and representation for masc-presenting queer people.

Best Days Gone is a 3-track collection of singles that have been making their way, one-at-a-time, into cyberspace over the past few months and the EP is Heff’s follow-up to her 2023 debut offering, Odes of Hope for Sad Bois.  But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Heff is new to this business – far from it.  She cut her teeth as a teenager amongst Aberdeen’s healthy indie-band scene in the 2010s, before relocating to London and forming an electro-pop duo.  More recently, she decided to go the whole hog by launching herself as a solo performer, with the inspiration of those aforementioned killer influences for comfort.

reassuringly familiar

Opening track, Weavers Field, has been described as “…a melancholy and wistful slow-burn that treads the tightrope of hope and despair to perfection,” and, that’s a message that comes over loud and clear in lines like opening couplet: “He said you gotta shoot for the stars, as he took an all-knowing sip.  She said I already did and now I’ve come back again.”  It’s an atmospheric song in which Heff’s gently-strummed guitar is backed by producer Callum ‘Raff’ Rafferty’s discrete sound-effects.  Heff’s voice sounds reassuringly familiar, loaded as it seems to be with tones of Lucinda Williams or Chrissy Hynde as it conveys the wistfulness in the lyrics.

Speaking of the inspiration for Weavers Fields, Heff says: “[The song] is about witnessing seismic changes to the area that you grew up in through gentrification and an influx of new people, and that feeling of being left behind while the world around you transforms and moves on.”

what’s been and gone

Lead single, Heart On Trial is a slightly more intense, rockier affair.  Like Weavers Fields, it’s a song that looks back on what’s been and gone, to conclude that what is lost cannot be regained.  Propelled along by a chugging guitar lick and a persuasive bass/drum rhythm, it gives the impression that, within the low-key production, there’s a BIG song lurking, particularly when the saxophone kicks in.  Heff’s vocal style sounds less derivative here – more like what I’d imagine her natural singing voice to sound like – and it’s confident and forceful.

This short collection is wrapped up by Pathways, a song that gets everything back on track, after the despair expressed in Weavers… and Heart…  The song’s refrain: “I know that the life you want is a meeting of minds away…,” typifies the optimism, stoicism and good advice that Heff is trying to express and the tune builds to a level that could almost be described as ‘anthemic.”

sweet tunes

Heff embarked on this latest stage of her mission confident that her lyrics conveyed her messages.  With (Producer) Raff’s help, she’s also come up with tunes that provide the sweetness to help those messages be painlessly absorbed.  Thinking over the finished product, she shared her thoughts regarding the impact that she hopes her EP will have: “Hopefully people connect with it and it offers some escapism.  If people can connect the tracks to their own memories, I’ll be delighted.  That’s when you know something’s resonated.  I really want to find my audience and provide them with many more tunes going forward.”

No need for worries on that score, Heff.  These songs will resonate.

Watch the official video to Heart On Trial, the EP’s lead single, here:

Heff VanSaint online: Instagram / TikTok / YouTube / Spotity

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