NYC-based songwriter Maia Friedman has made the musical rounds over the past decade-plus—first as a part of the art-pop collectives BOBBY (alongside Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath) and Towbow, and more recently as a member of Dirty Projectors and the LA-formed Coco. Yet in 2022 the artist finally made a solo bid with her debut full-length Under the New Light, a culmination of those various projects’ avant-folk sounds paired with more personal writing. Friedman keeps momentum up with her first new single since that release, “On Passing,” a loose track examining the complex emotions stirred up by the loss of loved ones and an instrumental that recalls Dirty Projectors’ flightiest tracks like “Two Doves.”
“Processing end-of-life is at once entirely natural and human, and at the same time, entirely abstract and unimaginable,” Friedman shares of the track, which matches its concept’s elusiveness despite approaching it with a bit of whimsy. “It feels impossible to fathom, thus we vacillate through emotions: despair, anger, disbelief, confusion, and one eventually settles into a permanent melancholy (the quiet sadness) that will forever be tied to the memory of those we’ve lost. I find it healing to celebrate these memories in ephemeral moments of magic: a leaf falling from a tree, the glint and reflection of sun on water, a particular scent in the air, a bird that visits our windowsill unexpectedly.”
Check out a video for the track below, which sets the song to what looks like vacation footage (only, y’know, not the boring kind relatives show you).
