Written during the height of the COVID pandemic, ‘Stuck Inside’, the third single from maeve & quinn’s upcoming LP, ‘Another Door’, navigates the challenge of reconciling our inner life – the stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible in love, work, community – with the reality in which we find ourselves.
maeve & quinn formed in 2016, with the duo’s foundation of rigorous training and performance in classical music launching them a decorated trajectory beginning in Anchorage, Alaska that continued through their earning of performance degrees at Northwestern’s Binen School of Music, outside Chicago. Being avid musical improvisers, in their early days the duo were influenced by the genre cross-pollination of Chicago’s music scene. As well as this, they had a formative songwriting period together in Dublin, Ireland, where Bryce was a poetry masters student at Trinity College and both sisters were immersed in the storytelling culture of the local Irish community.
A duo comprising Alaskan twin sister songwriters and instrumentalists, Maris and Bryce O’Tierney, maeve & quinn’s imaginative and skillfully rendered sound brings the feel of the open, majestic landscape of their Alaskan upbringing across the many instruments (guitar, violin, piano, voice) they play, with a distinctive, genre-bending fusion of alt rock, folk and pop, accentuated by sibling harmonies and dynamic interplay. The lifelong friendship of the twin sisters makes for a unique collaboration, with songs that are an intimate conversation, multi-layered in perspective and fluid between past and present.
maeve & quinn are interdisciplinary artists who place their original songwriting, poetry in recitation, and intrumental music in conversation with other art forms. The sisters’ unique collaboration connects with audiences in various settings: in Chicago, they have created performance programs with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Poetry Foundation, and Steppenwolf Theatre, engaging themes of family lineage, climate change, mental health, and womanhood. The duo has premiered their symphonic works with the Chicago Composers Orchestra and Anchorage Symphony Orchestra. Music video collaborations include with the Alvin Ailey Amercian Dance Theatre.
maeve & quinn’s catalogue includes EPs ‘Something Overhead, Something Overhead’ (2018), and ‘Star-Crossed’ (2021), the latter a Bandcamp New & Notable release. The duo’s forthcoming release, ‘Another Door,’ is their first LP.
The third single for ‘Another Door,’ ‘Stuck Inside,’ is restless but resolute, as the Alaskan twin sisters trade vocal verses and build a playful rhythmic interplay with guitar and violin. ‘Stuck Inside’ pushes back against feelings of disconnection and disappointment, inviting the listener to take steps forward despite uncertainty and self-doubt, to make the future one wishes to live:
“I build another door / and I walk right through”.
The music video for ‘Stuck Inside’ was co-created by maeve % quinn and Chicago-based artist, designer and animator Izzi Vasquez, with the video animation and editing by Izzi, and video footage captured by maeve & quinn on their phone cameras during the pandemic in Alaska (their home state), Chicago (their musical base), and Colarado (where one of the sisters teaches poetry and writing).
Find out more about maeve & quinn on their official website, Instagram, YouTube and Bandcamp.
