If the goal is for a collection of songs to become a whole -- a sum of sustenance, an entirety -- Izzy Heltai accomplishes that with his debut album Father, each track serving as a stepping stone on a single path of discovery.

With arrangements by his childhood friend Micah, recorded at Sleeper Cave Records in his home state of Massachusetts and produced by Sophie Buskin, who also provides backing vocals and harmonies on the record, you get a sense of home and comfort along the way. Even without dissecting the moving lyrics and the undercurrent of growth and resolution, these are the tales of a person in bloom -- not so much the sunlit bursting of a garden bud but more the fuzzy unfurling of a woodland fern, the success of pushing up and through the ground covering that had nourished when it could have smothered.