Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about each other’s death. The two longtime friends and bandmates in Burlington chamber-folk duo Cricket Blue even penned eulogies for each other on their forthcoming record, Sweet Animal. The songs “Tuesday I” and “Tuesday II” describe how each meets their future end.
“Taylor goes out in a mass-extinction event,” Heaberlin revealed in a recent conversation about the album’s core theme of mortality. “My death was much smaller and more intimate.”
Due out this Friday, September 18, Sweet Animal is a 20-song philosophical back-and-forth between Heaberlin and Smith focused on death, grief and the idea of an afterlife. Cricket Blue’s first album since 2019’s Serotinalia is also highly ambitious, featuring more than 20 guest musicians plucked from a vibrant local scene adding an orchestral and electronic veneer to their folk sound.
The duo spent years writing and recording the new record, during which they realized their differing views on the big sleep made for a rich field to mine as songwriters. Smith, 36, was raised in an evangelical Christian faith but left the church in college, coming to believe that there is no afterlife. In contrast, Heaberlin, also 36, grew up in an atheist household but over the years has come to reject the notion that, as she put it, “life turns off like a TV when your body expires.”
Rather than a debate or argument to be won, Sweet Animal is a comparison of perspectives on life’s greatest mystery. At times, it’s intellectual; at others, hearts are on sleeves. But the depth and ease of the conversation that underpins the record displays the intimate bond the two friends have developed since meeting at Middlebury College as music students in 2010.
“We’re coming up on 20 years of knowing each other,” Smith said, looking somewhat surprised by his own admission. “Over that time, we’ve figured out how to preemptively incorporate the other one’s perspectives in an interesting way.”
As close friends and essentially business partners for so many years, the two have forged a profound rapport that allows them to delve deep as songwriters. Sweet Animal views death as a materialist concern and simultaneously something more supernatural. Heaberlin even penned a song attempting to square their differing views: “Bees III (On and On)” incorporates Smith’s belief that one’s life is defined by how they lived, rather than where they might be going.
“Go on, Taylor: when the bells are rung,” Heaberlin sings over an ascending acoustic guitar figure that builds into a triumphant elegy, with strings fittingly arranged by Smith. “Little pieces of you move in everyone you love.”
“Taylor grew up believing in eternal life,” Heaberlin explained. “The idea of giving up the afterlife felt hard for him. So, I wrote a song about all the ways that Taylor influenced me and everyone else who loves him, and that we’ll continue to live with those experiences. Which, I think, is sort of what the afterlife is to him — the legacy you leave.”
Losing his religion didn’t just change the way Smith conceived of death.
“A belief in an afterlife colors your whole view of the world,” he said. “If this life is just a brief window into eternity, surely eternity matters more, right? After I de-converted, I started to realize that life is all that matters. There’s no consolation prize if you screw this one up, which I find motivating, really.”
That view materializes on a track that Smith wrote entitled “You.” The song lurches through time like something out of Slaughterhouse-Five: He flies through memories of friends, family and past loves, all seemingly occurring at once. The sound begins with the building power of an indie-folk anthem, not unlike a Fleet Foxes track, but detours into a stop-start rhythm as Smith’s conversational melody sprawls outward.
“You’re credentialed, shacking with your babydoll / You’re cut up by surgeons and I never call / You cover the floors with sawdust and clay / You know that I lied and will never explain,” Smith sings, presenting a sort of highlight reel of the emotional entanglements of a lifetime.
Heaberlin’s songs take a more spiritual view, particularly on the hauntingly gorgeous “Ella I,” a paean to her late grandmother.
“And you always call on Ella, though Ella isn’t here,” she sings in a hushed tone, over a rich orchestral score arranged by Smith. “On your side it is a mirror, on hers the glass is clear — / or is it just imagination that makes a sign appear?”
Despite their somewhat opposed ideas of what happens when the lights go out, the two are in agreement that Sweet Animal, as both a double album and a concept record, represents a leveling up of their craft. The duo tracked much of it at Heaberlin’s house and Big Lake Recording in Burlington and incorporated a huge swath of the local music scene: Goose drummer Cotter Ellis, guitarist Tom Pearo, trumpet player and singer-songwriter Connor Young, Couchsleepers’ Harrison Hsiang on piano, and bassist Kyle Saulnier of Saturn People’s Sound Collective, among others.
It all adds up to the band taking its previous intimate and often stripped-down sound and coloring it in with big, classical-leaning string arrangements and a touch of electronic music, courtesy of frequent collaborator Christopher Hawthorn, a Burlington expat.
The slew of collaborators shows how connected Cricket Blue are to the Burlington music scene, despite being stylistically unique. In a city chock-full of young indie-rock and jam bands, Smith and Heaberlin’s brand of progressive, lyrically hyper-literate chamber folk stands out.
“I truly feel molded by the Burlington music scene,” Smith said. “I would have never even tried to take music this seriously were it not for the vibrancy of the scene and that feeling of being inspired and supported by other musicians. Quite simply, this record could not exist without the deep bench of the local scene.”
There’s a lot of celebration of life on this record.
Taylor Smith
He and Heaberlin will draw on all that local talent at a release show for the new album on Friday, September 25, at the First Unitarian Universalist Society in Burlington. The show will likely be their only live opportunity to capture the massive sounds of Sweet Animal: They’ll be joined by an 11-piece orchestra and a bevy of guest vocalists.
“It’s exciting to present the songs as fleshed out as we can for this show,” Smith said. “It’s fitting that we celebrate an album that actually isn’t as dour as a ‘death record’ might sound. There’s a lot of celebration of life on this record.”
Indeed, rather than finding the material grim, Heaberlin values how the record pushed her to reckon with death, including her own. She’s formed ideas about what she’d like to leave behind after she dies. Some are more tangible than others.
“I want a really spooky gravestone,” she said. “I want people to come find my grave, and I want it to feel like something out of the 1800s. I mean, I still want death to be spooky sometimes.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Many Deaths of Cricket Blue: The Burlington chamber-folk duo’s new album is a 20-song meditation on what happens when we die”
This article appears in Performing Arts Preview • 2026.
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