Birmingham is a feeling town. We are a community of empaths and our soundtrack could be played out by Heather and Hay. The two-piece indie folk band consists of Arrany Spence and Garrett Reaves (he’s Heather as the band’s social profiles inform us). The band has tugged at heartstrings through live performances and masterful recordings of poetic thoughts on songs like “All My Love”, “Daisies”, and “Tie It All Down”. As the band continues to expand forward with their sound, they are equally thankful for the path that took them to the present day.
“I started playing guitar when I was in sixth grade. When I got into middle school, I went through my dad rock phase as I like to call it,” Reaves shares, “Everyone was going through their pop-punk phase - I was learning Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and Guns N Roses riffs. I wanted to be a shredder. Then I spent a couple of years at The University of Alabama learning jazz studies, theory, and everything. While I was there I fell in love with songwriting and went the other way with it.” Garrett took his newfound passion with him when he transferred to UAB in 2019, where he would soon meet his Heather and Hay counterpart Arrany.
“For me, I’ve been singing and songwriting since I was a little kid. Then I started taking guitar lessons when I was about twelve,” Spence recalls. When she went to college at UAB the question wasn’t what in life she wanted to do but more specifically what in music she wanted to do. “I figured doing music tech would work best. I want to be a songwriter. That’s my thing, that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I like to do. I wanted to make connections in school. Not just get the information but meet the people so I met Garrett and I was like ‘Look I did it. Look mom, I made it.’ We’ve been writing together for three years now.”
UAB classes intertwined the stories of these two musicians, and they both felt a songwriting connection fairly early on. They met in the spring of 2020 and had started writing together by the fall. “He would text me something and I would write it in my dorm and be all depressed in the pandemic,” Arrany recollects.
“We figured out pretty quickly that we wanted to do what we were doing,” the bandmates recall, “It wasn’t a hard decision. The way that we write meshes really well.” The first song the duo made came together like most everything after. Reaves had a guitar piece written in his head and sent it to Spence to see if she had any lyrics for it. “And I did,” Arrany shares, “I listened to it then went out on my balcony and sat with it for a little while then was like ‘Here’s a chorus’ within half an hour.” They then went back and forth by text over the bigger picture of the song before diving into the finer details. A fun, lowkey process that further showed the two musicians why they work so well together.
The lyrics normally come easy for Arrany, who has been songwriting her whole life and always knew she wanted to be a singer or an author (she became both). When working with Reaves, Space typically uses the feelings felt behind Garrett’s guitar to dictate the direction of her songwriting. “It’s kind of a blessing and a curse because sometimes songwriting is really easy and I write whole songs within an hour and then there it is and it’s great,” she explains, “But sometimes when it’s not coming I get frustrated really easily because I’m so used to it being ‘Oh hear it is.’ That’s something I’ve been trying to work on more recently.”
The first song written by Heather and Hay was “Daisies”, but “All My Love” was actually the first song released by the band in the summer of 2021. They released “Daisies” and “Tie It All Down” in 2022 and are currently working on a new single and an EP. “Tie It All Down” featured the first appearance of Martha, a 1950s archtop guitar that provides a wistful, darker sound. Arrany and Garrett decided to work with Audio 55 in Woodlawn, where Josh Ford is able to work studio magic to bring new magic to Heather and Hay songs by filling gaps while adding synths and harmonies.
With all that Heather and Hay are doing, they are proud to be doing so in Birmingham. “I’ve been here my whole life. I am from here, like hardcore from here. I was homeschooled so I was just up in the city during a lot of high school. I think there is something special about having that much of a connection to a place. A lot of my songs - there’s people and places and things that I’ve done that are in there that I wouldn’t have done anywhere else,” Arrany tells. Garrett fully agreed, while also reflecting on the amount of genuine support that he’s seen from different genres of music fans in Birmingham while playing shows with Heather and Hay as well as Rose Garden and Of Violet. “The ones that do like to go hear music - they’re there all night, they want to talk to you after, and they just want to be supportive,” Reaves explains, “And the other bands are all super supportive - they’re all just happy to be there. It’s super nice to be around that sort of environment where we’re all just holding each other up.”
“We have a lot of friends who are really supportive, and we’ve made a lot of friends,” Spence reflects, “People showing up and actually giving a damn is what made my voice as a writer improve and change and go through the necessary evolutions to connect with people. It’s really nice to build a connection. When they cry, I cry.”
Let the tears flow Birmingham, Heather and Hay is here with the audio comfort.
