Blame Is The Thing With Feathers in Heather Maloney’s Breakup Music Video

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This is an exclusive first video, part of WBUR’s efforts to showcase New England musicians.

For a long time, songwriting was almost a form of therapy for Heather Maloney. She wrote songs to remember the mistakes she made and the patterns she wanted to break. (I’m scared of getting a tattoo, she says, so I just put it in a song.) But at some point, Maloney started to relax. I started to have a lot more fun with it, she says.

This is how she ended up inventing a break up to write a song about it.

I was sort of taking stock and realizing that I had never written a breakup song before, says the western Massachusetts singer-songwriter. And, you know, it’s such a juicy human subject. Breakups are a great genre of songwriting because there is so much scope for drama and story making.

As Maloney considered all the great breakup songs already in the world, she realized that something was missing. I noticed that most breakup songs clearly have a victim and a villain, she says. Breakups, Maloney thought, were very often about blaming yourself – yourself, the other – rather than taking responsibility. I just remember thinking, What if I wrote a breakup song about blame itself and its role in our failed relationships?

The result is Perch-less Bird, an exuberant song about the end of a romance. I see the blame / It’s a bird without a roost / It’s an old chorus / It’s a tired vulture, Maloney sings. She lives in a character who readily admits her role in a breakup, but refuses to wallow in self-recrimination. Self-blame, Maloney points out, is not the same as taking responsibility and can in fact be counterproductive. When you hurt someone, the instinct to flog yourself makes it hard to see the other person’s pain. Everything always revolves around “me,” says Maloney. It is not useful either.

In Perch-less Bird, regret looks like joy, and ambivalence is the main emotion. I never really wanted to leave, sings Maloney. I just wanted you to go. The only thing she is sure of is that the vulture that spins overhead – blame – will never be allowed to win the purchase.

Maloney is also a visual artist specializing in linocut, and she designed the block and homemade illustrations in the song’s music video. (Video was animated by Jay Reiss.) In it, a woman spends her day, discovering feathers among her belongings, which she picks up in a bag. A bird’s shadow stalks her as she walks through a forest. When we finally see his face, he’s masked, his eyes strangely framed by two wing-shaped hands. She comes to the edge of a cliff and throws the feathers and mask into the ocean.

The feathers represent the little corners of ourselves [where] We harbored some sort of blame for ourselves or for others, Maloney explains. What about the mask? Blame is not inherent in who we are. It’s something that can be learned, she said. You can choose to wear it or not.

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