The latest single from Brooklyn-based musician Avery Friedman opens with soft guitars and hushed harmonies, a layered blanket of sound that ushers in a fragile vocal. Flowers Fell finds more stable footing as its solid drum beat cautiously thumps out, like feet testing the ground. Avery’s music here floats on a complex ocean of noise — distortion and fragments glimmer, but the overall texture pulls together to create a sense of buoyancy.
Having originally felt that songwriting was something reserved for other people, Friedman began taking music seriously following both a transcendent live music experience and a traumatic mugging, that led to her seeking solace in music. Having first taken to the stage in July last year, she has since shared it with a number of artists, including h. pruz, Dead Gowns and Sister. She is now in the process of releasing her first album.
Coming ahead of Friedman’s debut LP, New Thing, the song Flowers Fell represents its lead single. Weaving together grungy, distorted instrumentation, Avery creates a soundscape that slowly builds, as she explores the human experience of change and transformation, most directly paralleled in our sensation of the changing seasons:
‘The opening melody for Flowers Fell came to me on a headphone-less walk home one night down Greene Avenue in Brooklyn. I had noticed that the flowers that once lined the branches had been replaced by leaves — seemingly in the blink of an eye. I was briefly disappointed until I considered that the petals had made way for something more sustainable – and equally full of life. The song became a meditation on the concept of place – how things of our surroundings like “sidewalks,” and “balconies” and “trees,” can act as fixed backdrops upon which we measure our personal evolutions (and the evolutions of our relationships) across the span of many seasons.’
I’ve already referenced how relevant this notion of change feels right now, in early January, not just seasonally, but politically and from a more macro-societal perspective. I find the Stoicism Friedman employs on Flowers Fell comforting. It isn’t about letting go and giving up on creating the change you want, but instead reflects a recognition that things naturally evolve, and cycle. Check it out below: