Father’s Day has come and gone — but Hope Waidley isn’t finished celebrating Mother’s Day.
“It feels impossible to put someone like my mother into the perfect words,” the Michigan-born folk-pop singer/songwriter muses on her most recent single To My Mother. “This woman has the purest heart, one that love pours out of in the most precious way.
“She has always put her family’s needs before her individual needs, she is humble and raw, and she never hid her wounds from us which is something I’m incredibly grateful for because we got to see how God heals those wounds.
“We acquire parts of our parents when they’re involved in our lives and it brings me joy to know that she’ll live forever in me, in my blood, and in the way I carry myself.”
Hope’s wildly distinctive, aurally arresting voice and all-encompassing, genre-bending musical prowess aren’t easy ones to categorize, but for Waidley, those carried results are channelling her unwavering passion and talent as a rapidly emerging artist to bring people together and unite them through music.
“I’m just a college kid writing songs,” she says, perched atop a well-travelled RV somewhere along California’s surf-haven of a coastline, a chapter Waidley is currently living. “I’ve often felt as if each song I write is a friend to me, a friend that is filled with everything I need to hear at that moment, whether it be to cope or simply just to process.”
Closure, another recent release, is a perfect example of this, she explains. “The song was written during a very difficult time and it became my best friend. The words came as if they were a gift and I’d sing them over and over again. It would put me at ease…
“I suppose the idea of putting a piano out in a field attracted me because it’s unnatural but beautiful, much like finding closure in an unsettled situation could be,” she reflects on the stunning video’s storyline. “I decided to jump in the pond the day of the video, hoping it would capture the drowning feeling I felt during the time I wrote the song, and then the escape that came from that.”
Check out To My Mother and Closure above, and connect with Hope Waidley via her website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
