LISTEN: Heidi Newfield, “When Heaven Falls”

Artist: Heidi Newfield
Hometown: Healdsburg, California
Song: “When Heaven Falls”
Album: The Barfly Sessions, Vol. 1
Release Date: August 28. 2020
Label: Notfamousenough, Inc.

In Their Words: “I wrote this song with Chris Stapleton and Trent Willmon. It was the second of two songs we wrote that day. The first was very cool and a great start… but we had a lot of day left so I told the guys I had this title called ‘When Heaven Falls,’ which originated with the loss of my mother Mary Ann back in 2004. I’d been carrying around all this grief, but hadn’t properly mourned her. I worked through the pain. I stayed on the road and in the studio. That kind of pain always manifests and finds its way out eventually — and for me, a lot of it was through this song.

“Chris laid his head back after thinking on it for a bit and began singing that opening phrase… ‘It’s the burning of an angel damned, that lingers in the souls of man…’ Trent and I just looked at each other and said a resounding ‘YES!!’ We jumped in there and out of our efforts that day came this beautiful and haunting song. It is the pure embodiment of loss, hurt, struggle, helplessness, and a broken heart… how it feels, looks, sounds, and hurts when Heaven falls…” [Read more below.]

“The track was the very last song we recorded that week. My voice was a little tired and worn, but my co-producer Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and I felt it would be a beautifully emotional way to close out the 17 songs we’d recorded late that night. We gathered around with Bobby Terry and David Grissom grabbing guitars. Bobby began playing that stunning acoustic opening lick. We wanted to keep it sparse and open…leaving lots of room and space for the listener’s thoughts.

“Michael Rhodes hopped in there with an old funky bass that sounded like a fretless, but wasn’t. Fred Eltringham kept it so vibey on drums playing just enough to hold us together and add those dynamics. He’s so great! That solo was everyone playing a full piece of an arrangement that was a bit fragile. It could’ve fallen apart at any second, but everyone played those notes stunningly, as a team, as a band. We decided to use my tracking vocal and not mess with it. It’s a little tattered and it’s not busy or fancy, but there was a timing and a transparency that was captured in that moment we wanted to keep. I laid down a harmony part or two and Moose laid one down, too, later in the song, but we kept it simple and honest. You can’t listen to this track without feeling a bit empty. That’s the point of it all.” — Heidi Newfield

Photo credit: Jeremy Fraser