Premiere: Ari & Mia bask in life’s sunny circles with ‘Sew the City’

The sun rises and falls on our time here faster than we know it. Time’s rapid motion, like a pendulum over the sea, is a jarring, crushing reality that we all must face. We make a promise not to let it slip by, and even such self-awareness can’t slow things down. Sibling folk duo Ari & Mia staple up a musing on life, a carpe diem blast wrapped in finger-picking and a warm, crisp melody, with their new song “Sew the City,” premiering today. Grafted from personal experience, looking to their maternal grandmother for guidance and truth, the song circles the earth like the fading of seasons, from the varnished oranges and browns of fall to an untouched dusting of snow to the summer’s sharp graze.

“And I’ll be here for breakfast when the sun comes up / And if you let me borrow the Cadillac I’ll take it slow, slow, slow,” the sisters dance together like silky ribbons in twilight. “As autumns pass and summers roll and these evenings fade from orange to gold / I pray that I too will be young when I’m old.” Their voices are both sweet and bitter, cloaked with a delightfully chipper belief in something greater at work just below the cool surface. The unknown is a looming driver to send the Friedman sisters spiraling to their next destination, perhaps unwitting and innocent.

“I went to college twenty minutes from Mia’s and my maternal grandparents in the suburbs of Chicago. We had dinner together an average of once a week for four years and were extremely close. Two years after I graduated and moved back to Boston, they both died within four weeks of each other,” Ari explains to B-Sides & Badlands of the song, which then examines “my relationship with them, mostly focusing on my grandmother.” With the hook, which reads “Sweetheart, little darling, grab your coat, the night’s still young,” Ari seeks her grandmother’s light to soak her soul. “That’s my grandmother speaking to me. Both she and my grandfather taught me how to seize life, to squeeze out every last drop of joy, learning, love,” adds Ari, who has won ASTA’s Alternative Styles Award and toured with such landmark folk-centric acts as Hanneke Cassel, the Sail Away Ladies and Childsplay.

Both accomplished players and songwriters, Ari & Mia blend hearty-stock folk music with the brittle escape of lush Appalachian touch points. They rise and fall as lilac petals on the wind, often baring the weight of loss on their shoulders but also basking in a redemptive ocean of sun. “After a decade of playing together and being extremely close friends, we know how the other operates, both musically and otherwise, and we can almost read each other’s minds,” says Ari, who traded off producing the new album, engineered by Ariel Bernstein. “We aren’t afraid of conflict because we have the tools to communicate when we disagree, and we never stay upset with each other for too long. When we’re on the road and we get into a disagreement, and it’s just the two of us in a car, grumpy for miles… I’d say that can be difficult.”

That friction can unlock even more potential. Also sharing songwriting tales, bringing bare bones of songs to each other, stark poetry of ongoing sojourns, the two relish in the challenge. “We slowly make our way through the song, finding exciting ways to involve our four voices (two vocals and two instruments),” says Mia, a 2010 John Lennon Songwriting Contest winner and also a player in Hollow Deck and rock band Creative Healing. “We tend to have fairly different musical tendencies, and we bring a wide variety of arrangement ideas to these rehearsals. We’ve gotten good at communicating our ideas to each other, staying open about them, trying them out, and then coming to a decision about what best serves the song.”

“Sew the City” serves as the title cut to the duo’s new album, expected next Friday (March 1).

Listen below:

Photo Credit: Kat Waterman

Follow Ari & Mia on their socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website