MARIS & BRYCE O'TIERNEY OF MAEVE & QUINN
Maeve & Quinn is the duo of Alaskan twin sister songwriters and instrumentalists Maris and Bryce O'Tierney. maeve & quinn’s sound is imaginative and skillfully rendered across the many instruments they play (guitar, violin, piano, voice) and distinctive in its genre-bending fusion of alt rock, folk, and pop that’s accentuated by blood harmonies and dynamic interplay. The open, majestic landscape of an Alaskan upbringing can be felt in Maeve & Quinn’s music and performances. Their lifelong friendship as twin sisters makes for a unique collaboration and songs that are an intimate conversation, multi-layered in perspective and fluid between past and present.
"I Know I Will” is the fourth single from Maeve & Quinn’s upcoming LP Another Door. The song speaks to the tenuous liminal space between leaving a romantic relationship and shoring oneself up to move forward. The song begins with a reflective, spare electric guitar line that accompanies the narrator as she seeks to find her emotional footing. Instrumentation builds as the lyrics become more self-assured, resounding especially in the choruses where the twin sisters’ blood harmonies shine — “I’m not sorry that I’m on my own / the sky is clear”, embracing the freshness and freedom of returning to one’s own company. The push and pull remains though, between what we hold onto and what we let go of as hindsight informs our experience of a relationship — "My memory has a memory / that brings me back to you / my memory has a memory / and I don't know what's true". The song ultimately arrives at a place of readiness to heal. Grounded in piano and electric guitar motifs, the outro is an expansive instrumental landscape, an arc toward being at peace with oneself, with or without a significant other.
Maeve & Quinn formed in 2016. The duo’s rigorous training and performance in classical music set their foundation, launching a decorated trajectory that began in Anchorage, Alaska, and continued through their earning of performance degrees at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, outside Chicago. Avid musical improvisers, the duo in their early days were influenced by the genre cross-pollination of Chicago’s music scene. They also had a formative songwriting period together in Dublin, Ireland, where Bryce was a poetry master’s student at Trinity College and both sisters were immersed in the storytelling culture of the local Irish community.
Image-Maren Celest
