Words + Photos By: Caroline Safran
I sat down with Kristin and Cole, who together make up mmeadows. The NYC based duo have been on the road for the bulk of September and October, sharing their bouncy, floaty alt-pop project. We spoke about steadiness, authenticity, and community, on what appeared to be the very last hot day in September. A few days after, I caught their show at TV Eye opening for Finom. It was a rainy night in Brooklyn, and somehow that felt like the right vibe for a visit into Kristin and Cole’s world. The show was vibrant and innovative (Cole was using an “electronic valve instrument,” a breath synthesizer developed in 1975), and the way the alt-pop sprinkled over the crowd was effervescent. Here’s some bits from our conversation (not including discussion of ground cherries, a farmer’s market delicacy) and snaps from the show.
Caroline: “Baby-by” is dreamy, floaty, bouncy, and round, a track punctuated with delicate vocals and retro inspired synths. The juxtaposition of romantic melody and dancey beats makes for an addicting track that feels like this exact moment in time–a New York in the dregs of summer, all of us walking with the post-summer fatigue and ready to dive into something more steady. What role does steadiness play in your music, and what is your sense of it in your current releases as you solidify your identity as a duo?
Kristin: When I think about steadiness, the first thing that comes to my mind is our relationship. That's the one constant in both of our lives as we do stuff with other projects, moving from one place to another. At this point, because we have so much trust in each other, that trust extends into the musical collaboration. Luckily, our tastes are very much aligned, because we have pretty much grown up with each other. We're exposing ourselves to the same exact things at all times and we speak the same musical language. We know what each other means very quickly and easily. The relationship is where I personally find my grounding. By virtue of the fact that we've been at it for years, there's a certain steadiness and a kind of knowing what we're capable of, knowing what we want to say, and knowing how to communicate it.
Cole: Steadiness is required to trust musically in ourselves, to not follow anything except what we truly believe in. That requires a steadiness, to not fall into any trappings of like, “we are a couple and therefore, we should be doing this” or “we are this old, and we should definitely be doing this.” It's more about starting with the trust and the steadiness that we've established over our long musical relationship.
Caroline: “You Should Know by Now” is a punchy track about the frustration of wanting to deliver a message of love and not totally knowing how. You’ve had a few collaborators give their own spin on this track, with remixes by a few folks. Would you say this community input was an intentional choice based on the themes of this track? How does the community inform your creative process?
Cole: Having grown up in the city, in a very art-accepting family, I don't almost don't know what it's like to not be in a musical artist community. I'm so lucky in that sense. I love the music that my friends make so much. I try to look for new music and go out and listen to what everybody is doing. But then I'll go back and I'll put a Joan As Police Woman record on, or other friends. It's priceless. I know them. But I think objectively, also, we're just so lucky to have so many friends that are just making such dope music. It's both a love, and also a want to be vibrant in that community.
Caroline: That's something I was specifically talking about with a friend of mine yesterday. He was asking me what I’ve been listening to, and the majority is the music that my friends make. I don't know if it's chicken or egg in that situation: am I so drawn to it because they're my friends and because I respect them, and I know them multi-dimensionally? Or is it that the music is so great, and they also happen to be my friends? It’s just such a privilege to get to consume art that people you care about make. I just want to make cool shit for my friends and get their input, and vice versa. I want to make something real, that comes from the deepest part of myself, and part of that is sharing it with the ones I love.
Cole: We're always trying to make sure that we're imparting that authenticity, so that when we go on tour to a town we've never been to, with people we've never met, we can convey ourselves. That's what we want to do. Playing shows is a favorite thing to do, and I feel like we're pretty good at it. We're able to communicate through music. I think that that is directly related to community, because we know what it's like to share that real, genuine symbiosis with another person, or people.
Kristin: On community, we've done a few of these songwriting weeks with a group of 30 people hosted by our friend Alex. In one week, everybody writes one song per day, so you come out with seven songs. In May 2020, we were together in my parents home in Maine, and we spent the week separately writing songs. In the morning, Alex would compile all of the songs into a playlist, and then you could listen to everybody's songs. At the end, there were 30 people, each with seven songs. It was incredible. And I'd never done anything like that before.
Caroline: Thematically, your music has consistently coupled vivid lyrical imagery dancing atop avant-pop beats. “Light Moves Around You” is earthy, with an organic swell, tethered to lyrical themes of growth and separation from the past self in favor of the pleasures of presence, especially in nature. How does that come up in your songwriting process?
Kristin: At the beginning of this writing process, I thought it was going to be a record about discovering myself or whatever. But living through such a catastrophic time, COVID wise, had me thinking about the Earth, so there's a big water theme on this record. The overarching theme of the record is finding peace amongst a really chaotic world. Like we spoke about earlier, with steadiness.
Cole: Art is just the way we know how to process these things. Hopefully, we've worked hard enough at the craft and expression so that when it does come out, it comes out in something that looks or sounds good.
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