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Sew the City

by Ari & Mia

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1.
Come On Home 03:38
2.
Apples 03:09
3.
4.
Nostalgia 04:25
5.
Roll Away 03:56
6.
7.
8.
Til I Die 04:05
9.
Sew the CIty 03:33
10.

about

We recorded Sew The City in the gorgeous and isolated Great North Sound Society in Parsonsfield, Maine. An old farmhouse was the perfect place to access quiet and creativity. Days went back and forth between speckled sunlight and pounding rain. Between live takes, we spent time cooking—mostly quinoa and tofu scrambles—editing lyrics, and eating ice cream. 


Ariel Bernstein engineered the album with the help of GNSS intern Abigale Sullivan. We produced the album ourselves with insightful input from Ariel and recorded all the takes live together in one room. Other than a few third harmony parts that we overdubbed and Ariel Bernstein’s added percussion on two tracks, this resulted in an album that sounds exactly like what our audience would hear at a live show. The sound is organic and full and it features intricately designed parts for all four of our voices (two vocals and two instruments). 

Recording Sew The City felt freeing and exhilarating, most likely due to being isolated in a gorgeous place where our only goal was birthing this album. We allowed ourselves to be influenced by the place itself, like when we recorded “Unquiet Grave” directly after we had visited the extremely old and (definitely) haunted basement. It was late in the evening and raining buckets outside.


The album has a subtle theme of paying homage to our fierce female ancestors. “Til I Die” and “Sew The City” both tell the stories of our maternal and paternal grandmothers respectively. On the more ridiculous side, “Roll Away” tells the story of the once-carpeted kitchen in Mia’s home, proudly built by her husband’s grandparents in the 1940s. We also cover a song by our all-time favorite (s)hero Joni Mitchell.“The Fiddle and the Drum” is a letter to North America; written in 1969 as an anti-war song, it wonders why this country has “traded the fiddle for the drum” while still remembering “all the good things you are.” We found this to be a fitting song to resurrect and rearrange at this particular moment in our country’s political climate and felt it was a poignant and thought-provoking song with which to end the album.

credits

released March 1, 2019

A. Friedman: voice & cello
M. Friedman: voice, fiddle, banjo
Ariel Bernstein: percussion

All songs composed by Ari & Mia, except Sweet Morning (Sacred Harp, H.S. Reese) and Fiddle and the Drum (Joni Mitchell).

Engineered by Ariel Bernstein with assistance from Abigale Sullivan at Great North Sound Society in Parsonsfield, ME

Mastered by Dan Cardinal at Dimension Sounds in Boston, MA

Cover art by Stevie Lewis

Graphic Design by Kat Waterman

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Ari & Mia Boston, Massachusetts

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