On their third album, Free Love, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn embrace the complexity of being human.
“It was this sort of instantaneous respect, and it felt reciprocal.”
But the partnership didn’t last long.
Credit: Matthew Priestley
After Coachella, Meath returned to Durham, N.C., where she’d moved after decamping from Brooklyn.
“She’s like, ‘Yeah, I think I’m in love.
And we’re going to make a wicked record,'” Feist says with a laugh.
Meath (left), in the trio Mountain Man, before she teamed up with Sanborn (right), who was then recording under his Made of Oak project.Josh Sisk/For The Washington Post via Getty Images; Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
She just had a big grin on her face, overflowing with ideas.
“It feels like MySpace again,” Meath says.
Free Loveis somehow prescient and nostalgic in the same breath.
It traffics in intimacy and self-preservation in the face of opening oneself up to love.
It’s almost creepy how prevalent those themes are in the world now."
Then we don’t talk about my songs."
She rolls her eyes and smiles.
“That being said,” she adds.
Each song is equal parts surprising and delightful.
The duo also willingly offer multiple points of entry.
Listeners who approach them on that level alone will find plenty to be thrilled with.
“What Amelia was doing was reacting to this increasingly tense world around us,” Sanborn says.
“She was looking inward and trying to remember all the times when loving other people was incredibly easy.
“It was like, ‘Oh no, this is bad.'”
“You plan out in your mind like, ‘Oh, this is going to be it.
We’re going to break through,'” Sanborn says.
But both agree there’s an unexpected upside to being forced to scale things down.
[We wanted] it to feel like it was one expression.
Seven years into their creative partnership, Meath and Sanborn still find new joys in making music together.
“It makes me want to be a better partner and a better producer.
“It’s the best thing we’ve ever made,” Meath says.
“Every other time I’ve finished a record, I’m not interested in hearing it again.
With this, I just f—ing love it.
I want to hear it all the time.
I’m so proud of it.”
The arenas will (god-willing) still be there next year, though.
For them, right now, success is in the small things.
Success is in learning the other’s language and using it to grow.
Success is building upon an expanding legacy.
Success is never compromising for the sake of a win.
Success is making one of the year’s most resonant, warm, necessary albums.
“The growth that we’re actually interested in is just being a better band,” Sanborn says.
“We each work endlessly at being better as individual artists and improving our creative relationship.
Every time we’ve improved that, our audience has gotten bigger.
I’m over-the-moon thrilled at the size of our audience at this moment.
How cool it is that we’ve made these weird songs and they resonated with that many people?
I can’t think of a better present.”
“Give me a smash hit,” she says with a laugh.
“Let me talk to America about how I don’t shave my armpits.
Put me in a thong, let me do a hit!
Put me on the couch!”
