The music industry is fleeting by its very nature. The whole thing is built around capturing an experience, and even those are becoming increasingly intangible. Artists and producers, the whole of the industry, really, often pass like ships in the night. That seems to the case with the new single from Moira & Claire, whose new single, “Better Than This” comes with a sharp twist of self-awareness.
This is the nature of the beast; the demands of the industry simply require a certain level of omnipresence, genius and authenticity. As one Hobbit once said, it’s like being stretched, “like butter scraped over too much bread.” Everyone is doing their damndest to make it work with what they’ve got, and in that shared experience there’s an authenticity. When moving at the necessary speeds, however, there seem to be questions that creep in, and whether many of these interactions are meaningful and lasting, or simply a matter of opportunity.
On the track, Moira & Claire sing: “Will you remember me when you leave, or will I just be someone you wrote a song with, in September when the weather was better than this?”
It calls into question not just the partnerships of convenience, but perhaps the whole nature of performance. When the world returns to normal, will music return with it? Will we even remember our festival friends?!
“‘Better Than This’ is from the perspective of someone who is processing the moving away of a new friend, and wondering if this friend misses them like they do,” says Moira.
“We wrote ‘Better Than This’ at the start of quarantine, when everything was starting to shut down. Usually, it takes us a while to write a full song, but this one came together in under an hour which is very different for us.”
Asking one of their musical inspirations to produce, tapping Breagh MacKinnon (Port Cities), Moira & Claire say they’re “obsessed with how it turned out.”
Moira & Claire seem to have a little more confidence about working with MacKinnon. The duo say that they’re planning to continue working with her as the producer for their next single which is scheduled to be released sometime in 2021.