Heidi Sidelinker Draws on Personal Experience to Make Gravitational Music

Heidi Sidelinker was in her second year at Appalachian State University when she finally admitted that something was wrong.

Though she loved living on her own away from home and had been succeeding in school, Sidelinker felt drawn to make music. So, she loaded her 12-string guitar and her 100-pound Black lab into her newly bought Subaru, stashed all the money she had under the floor mat and hit the road.

“I remember the feeling [of] getting in my car and driving towards Asheville and having music on and the windows down,” Sidelinker says. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I can go anywhere.’ It was so big, but also humbling.”

Sidelinker’s journey took her from the North Carolina mountains to the rocky beaches of Coos Bay, Oregon, then back again.

“It was the beginning of the rest of my life thus far,” Sidelinker recalls.

The trip kickstarted her transition into the singer-songwriter she was meant to be. It would not be the last time she settled into a situation only to eventually leave so she could experience more. The freedom promised by the beckoning highways, railways and riverways looms large in American music, but if Woody Guthrie’s journey was bound for glory, Sidelinker’s is bound for growth.

“Growth comes with being older and experiencing things that you can’t write about until you experience them,” says Sidelinker, who is now 44.

This wisdom garnered in the course of living imbues the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s work. It haunts the driving, percussively strummed “Cold and Lonely Hill,” Sidelinker’s dry-eyed ballad addressed to a deceased lover with whom she has unfinished business.

“There’s no heat or running water/ Granite Quarry’s done you in/ Wrote your songs, wrote your letters/ Tombstone’s your only friend…”

A similar gravitas is present in the spiraling, guitar-driven “Help Me Love You,” an emotionally conflicted secular hymn. It’s also ingrained in “Undress Your Heart,” where resonant piano and Sidelinker’s silvery 12-string underpin her heartfelt duet with Statesville singer-songwriter Edan Aldridge.

“Gonna clothe myself in kindness/ And hang it out to dry/ Undress your heart now/ so I can give you mine…”

“You’ve got to feel it before you can write it,” says Sidelinker, who’s scheduled to play a solo set at Petra’s on Oct. 17, sharing a lineup with Jade Moore’s group Jade & the J’Ukes and veteran South Carolina songbird Danielle Howle.

The road to self discovery and rock

Growing up in Hickory, Sidelinker was surrounded by music. Her father, a pianist and middle school band teacher, had played in pop-rock band the Barracudas, which scored a gold record in 1968 for the tune “No Matter What You Do.”

Despite this pedigree, Sidelinker never considered music for a career, even after she discovered her father’s six-string classical guitar while in high school and taught herself to play.

It was at App State where Sidelinker realized her calling. When not attending classes or studying, she played open mics and wrote songs. She recorded two CDs while in college, Dreamtime and Poetry, Essence, and Romance, but considers them juvenilia.

“I was young and figuring out songwriting without having the material of living,” she says.

Then came the trip where Sidelinker started collecting that necessary material. She told her parents that she had decided to drop out of school and pursue music; they gave her their blessings.

“They said, ‘Whatever you decide to do, do it fiercely and with passion and we’ll see where it goes,” Sidelinker remembers.

On her road trip, Sidelinker slept under the stars, busked on streets and played her 12-string in coffee shops for cash. Halfway through her journey, Sidelinker attended a beachside Fourth of July celebration in Coos Bay. She had wrapped her dog’s leash around her wrist when a firework spooked it. The animal took off and Sidelinker’s wrist suffered a spiral fracture.

Though the injury hurt, Sidelinker has always had a high tolerance for pain. She continued to play guitar and refused to cut her trip short.

By the time she returned home to Hickory, constant playing had exacerbated Sidelinker’s broken wrist. She needed surgery and had no insurance. Luckily, she found a musical community in the Davidson/Hickory area. Tim Helfrich, co-owner of Summit Coffee in Davidson and musicians in his own right, hosted a benefit concert that raised $10,000 to help pay for Sidelinker’s surgery.

Despite sustaining an injury that could have permanently inhibited her ability to play, Sidelinker considers her cross-country trip necessary.

“I had to go that far and try all these new things … to be able to come back and feel comfortable in my own skin,” she notes. “I realized everything I wanted was within me.”

With fellow musician Josh Pender, Sidelinker formed the duo Autumn and August, which relocated to NoDa, then still a funky arts district dominated by art galleries. She befriended Evening Muse co-owner Joe Kuhlmann and started tending bar at the music venue. In the meantime, she continued to play in Autumn and August while performing her own songs solo, often at Muse.

Read more: The Little Music Club That Could: The Evening Muse Turns 20 (2021)

At Neighborhood Theatre, Sidelinker opened for national acts including Blues Traveler and Iris Dement. She briefly joined Charlotte alt-rock band The New Familiars, occasionally touring with the outfit.

At Evening Muse, Sidelinker also met the members of Lowry, a touring indie folk-rock band from New York City.

When Lowry members asked her to join the band as a vocalist, she couldn’t resist the lure of the road. After a heart-to-heart talk with Kuhlmann, who encouraged Sidelinker to embark on her next adventure, she jumped into the band’s van for a three-month tour. After the tour, in 2006, Sidelinker moved with the band to NYC.

Although Sidelinker wrote all the harmonies on Lowry’s new material, she didn’t mind setting her solo songwriting career aside to be the band’s singer.

“[Playing solo] I did all my booking [and] I made my press kits; I was completely self-sufficient,” Sidelinker says. “I had this longing to play with other people, putting the guitar down and just getting to sing.”

During Sidelinker’s time with the band, Lowry released a few albums, toured nationally and traveled overseas to Europe.

Though Sidelinker was overwhelmed by European audiences’ enthusiastic reception of the band, she also realized that her time with Lowry was coming to a close.

“I was [wondering why] I was not happy anymore and starting to feel empty,” Sidelinker says. “I know now that [it was] because I’m a songwriter and guitar player. It’s what … I need to be doing.”

Sidelinker embraces motherhood and returns to songwriting

Sidelinker left Lowry in 2010 and got engaged to Dave Schiliro, a NYC-based cinematographer. The couple married in 2013 and in 2014 Sidelinker gave birth to her daughter — with no medical intervention or pain medications.

For the next few years, she set playing music professionally aside and threw herself into motherhood. She home-schooled her daughter and continued to nurse her until she turned 3.

“I got to a point where I was [being] mama to baby all day, every day — and I was missing music badly,” Sidelinker says.

While still nursing her daughter, Sidelinker started playing solo at a pizza joint across the street from the family’s apartment in Astoria, Queens. She would rush back home and nurse between sets. Starting from scratch after so many years away from songwriting and playing publicly, Sidelinker slowly reestablished herself in the city’s music scene.

In January 2020, Sidelinker became pregnant a second time. Then in February, COVID struck the city. She remembers it as a frightening time and place.

“It was like a zombie apocalypse going into Times Square for my doctor’s appointments,” Sidelinker says.

Sidelinker and Schiliro decided to move back to North Carolina to be closer to Sidelinker’s family. While her husband worked, Sidelinker packed up the family’s belongings and took on the task of moving.

Then, seven-months pregnant, in the middle of COVID and on her birthday, Sidelinker woke up with one half of her face paralyzed. The prognosis was Bell’s palsy, a paralysis caused by inflammation of the cranial nerve that controls facial muscles.

Concerned about the effects of prednisone on her unborn son’s health, Sidelinker refused the corticosteroid medication for her condition, opting for acupuncture instead. To this day, one of her eyes shuts when she sings.

Despite these hardships, Sidelinker’s family made the move to Sneads Ferry outside Winston-Salem, where her son was born. The family ultimately settled in Huntersville. Here, Sidelinker once again started from ground zero, rebuilding her career as a professional singer-songwriter and guitarist.

“All these years of having babies, going through COVID and my face being paralyzed — just the journey, those life experiences — that’s where the songwriting comes from now,” Sidelinker maintains.

Sidelinker formed folk-rock combo Heidi and the River Down, a rotating crew that includes mandolin and banjo player Mike Orlando, guitarist Billy Jones, bassist Phil Skipper and multi-instrumentalists Aldridge and Helfrich. In September, the band played its second annual Ramble On Fest, an event the group launched last year in Davidson.

Orlando calls Sidelinker “an emotional open book, which makes collaboration more genuine.”

“She can deliver a song in such a genuine way [and] light up the room like few performers I’ve been around,” he says. “People are attracted to her talent and the warmth that pours out of her on stage.”

Sidelinker also plays in a duo with Aldridge, as well as different configurations with Charlotte musicians like singer-songwriter Shana Blake and drummer Jim Brock.

She has also revived her solo career. On her website she has posted two recent demos that sound unlike anything she’s recorded before. The mysterious and untitled tunes feature jazz-pop piano, skittering percussion and swarming ethereal harmonies. Sidelinker’s guitar work, whether rippling and meditative or striking dissonant chords, is also pushed to the forefront.

Sidelinker is also set to release three completed tunes in October. Like the demos, they are also currently untitled, and they seamlessly fuse the dusky folk-inflected ruminations of Sidelinker’s work with Heidi and the River Down with delicate madrigal-like pop and feathered jazz phrasing reminiscent of Joni Mitchell.

Sidelinker states that her goal has always been to make music that moves people.

“I would like to think of myself as a connector,” she says. “I love having an intimate audience, where people walk away after listening to the music just feeling something.”

Despite producing a personal songbook informed by a life well-lived, Sidelinker at 44 is far from done with her artistic odyssey.

“I think I will always long for the road,” she says. “Once my children are grown, I would love to … drive out west to do some songwriting and self-reflection.”

It’s hard to imagine Sidelinker’s music without that elemental siren’s cry to move on and experience more. Her work personifies a bone-deep calling that tugs the heart like the tides and turns wanderlust into wisdom.