With Europe on pause, Reardon returns to write album, play Me&Thee

BY KRIS OLSON

Folk pop singer-songwriter Hayley

Reardon is home again, and this time she will be staying put — at least for a little while.

In addition to her show at Marblehead’s Me&Thee Music on Friday, Feb. 17 and other local gigs, she has rented a house in Gloucester, where she plans to spend a few months writing her first full-length album in years.

But if the past is prologue, where Reardon’s music might take her after that is anyone’s guess.

The Current recently caught up with Reardon to hear a bit about her travels, which have included recording sessions in Barcelona, a residency in Dachau, Germany; and a particularly harrowing horseback ride in Scandinavia.

Now 26, Reardon acknowledges that she is in a “gap year moment of my life.” The nature of her music means that Ticketmaster will probably never crash from the demand for tickets to her stadium tour.

“For a lot of people, what I do is boring,” she says, drawing a raised eyebrow from her interviewer. Reardon rephrases, giving herself the benefit of the same innate kindness that led her to become a peer spokesperson for PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center when she was a student at Marblehead High School.

“It’s very contained, and it’s intimate,” she says of her music. “There’s a certain type of person that feels things deeply and connects in that way, and those have been the people that I have resonated with.”

Now, staring at an unyielding need to do some “adulting,” Reardon recognizes the importance of financial security, if only to extend the journey she has been on.

“But I feel very successful in my heart,”

Oh, if there had been stories in the media 24 years ago about postpartum issues affecting new moms, what a difference it would have made. If only someone could have stuck a newspaper article under my nose while I rocked my baby and sobbed in all-encompassing fear. If only someone said, “Read this. This is what is happening. It is pretty common, and no, you do not have the exceedingly rare form of postpartum called psychosis. You are not going to hurt your baby. Everything will be okay.”

I am at once heartened and devastated by the media coverage of the recent tragedy in Duxbury. There a young mom of three was likely so deep into psychosis that she must have thought killing her babies and