Photo Credit: Alex Munro
NYC-based progressive pop duo mmeadows has shared the Light Moves Around You: Reworks EP, a collection of stripped-down recordings and remixes by Porches, Generationals, Hrishikesh Hirway, Salt Cathedral, Bayonne, and Tōth of songs from their debut album released earlier this year. In celebration, they’ve also shared a video for “Friendship (Acoustic).” This new version stretches the original’s ethereal, gentle lilt further, allowing it to climax with a blistered and spiky guitar solo courtesy of Okkervil River’s Will Graefe. mmeadows will also be playing a NYC show at Union Pool on November 29 with Aubrey Haddard. Tickets and more information are available here.
mmeadows shares: “Playing ‘Friendship’ live on tour over the past year has been one of our favorite moments of any given night — the mood becomes quiet and intimate and time slows down. That feeling amplified when we invited our friend Will Graefe to sit in on acoustic while we were on tour supporting Will Sheff. Graefe honored the song gorgeously while introducing some of his own chordal and timbral ideas and an incredible solo. When the tour concluded we knew we had to record the live version. We did three full takes, the three of us in our living room, and used the first one — it has a certain magic.”
Listen / Watch: “Friendship (Acoustic)”
For members Kristin Slipp and Cole Kamen-Green, mmeadows is a means of survival, an outlet to anchor themselves from the currents of life. “Kristin and I speak different ‘technical’ musical languages. But we are completely aligned in what we hear sonically and emotionally,” says Kamen-Green. “We rarely disagree on the direction of a song,” adds Slipp. Most of the record came together in a short period; a furious creative burst from the two locked-in collaborators: “Nine of the ten songs were written in the same week. That the songs began to crystallize in a very specific time and place lends to the sense that they are tied to one another,” Slipp explains.
In mmeadows, vocal-focused pop songwriting is the heartbeat of the band, enriched by their liberal usage of found sounds and esoteric vintage instruments, like Kamen-Green’s EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument) — as featured on today’s release — in their productions and performances. Following the release of their debut EP Who Do You Think You Are? (2020), where mmeadows sequenced a run of exploratory singles, their approach with their debut album was more intentional. The duo found purpose and peace in the creation of the tracks, and the result is a cohesive body of work that unfurls and grooves from the same time and space.
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