Heather Little- By Now review

Heather Little By Now Need to Know

It is fair that most of us haven’t previously heard Heather Little’s name.

She has recorded only a single previous album and her name isn’t bandied about as much—at least, as far as I’ve experienced—as other songwriters. We’ve heard her songs, certainly. She co-wrote one of Miranda Lambert’s first ‘big’ hits, “Gunpowder and Lead” (included here) as well as “Me and Charlie Talking,” “Two Rings Shy,” and “Girl Like Me,” and “Helluva Heart” with Sunny Sweeney and Deanna Bryant.

Now we have By Now available, and I must say, it is a sparkling album.

Unlike most of my favourite singer-songwriter albums, By Now is lushly produced. There is a lot going on instrumentally, and the arrangements are a bit more contrived than I typically appreciate. But, like albums from Kate Campbell, Kim Richey, and Patty Griffin (who guests on “This Life Without You” and “Hands Like Mine”), By Now is ideally presented.

Each of these songs are brief visits to characters who find themselves at crossroads or in unenviable situations where momentous decisions have been made.

“Sunset Inn” finds an abused woman discovering “do-overs and second chances” beyond “the pain you’ve always known.” “My Father’s Roof” is a reflection on a different situation, one where the quiet of a dead man’s house is broken: “the only sound inside’s the jingling of the belt…”

The self-determination of “Transistor Radio,” “California Queen,” and “Five Deer County” has been hard won, wrestled out of bad situations and compromised partners. “This Life Without You” serves as a capstone perhaps— sometimes, the truth is uncomfortable, but necessary: “This life without you will be ‘just fine.’” Little’s protagonists aren’t always the wronged party of her songs, as in “Hands Like Mine” (“They don’t make a ring for hands like mine.”)

Still, there is no shortage of guys who need to learn their lesson here, whether in the familiar “Gunpowder & Lead” (“He wants a fight, well now he’s got one…”) or “Better By Now” (“…a man like you won’t feel a thing, that sharp blade oughta come out clean…”).

Janis Ian could have written “Bones,” but Little did, capturing within its details a bit of magic:

Sleeping dogs don’t stay asleep,
There ain’t nothing sweet about 16.
Went to the dance with a Christian boy,
My homemade dress and his ’82 Ford…
Changed his religion for a while.

Throughout By Now Little captures a sense of nostalgia cemented within realism: trauma doesn’t fade. Doing so, she has created as honest and reflective album as we’ve recently encountered. We can’t go back, and damn it, if we could, we sure as hell wouldn’t. We survived it, and it has made us who we are—for good and worse.

Little has friends, and several are called upon to lend their voices to these songs. Rusty Van Sickle, Leslie Satcher, Ronnie Bowman, Crystal Bowersox, and Van Plating as well as Griffin appear on select songs. Instrumentally, familiar names include Joe Newberry (banjo), Audley Freed (guitars), Eamon McLaughlin (fiddle and mandolin), Duke Levine (guitars), Plating (violin), and Frank Swart (guitars, bass, mandolin, piano) who also co-produces with Brian Brinkerhoff.

Heather Little is special, and has a voice and the songs that should be heard. By Now is solidly on my list of 2024 favourites.