It Marks Such a Beginning for Me: Avery Friedman Chats About ‘New Thing’

Photo Credit: Mamie Heldman

Joe

“This is the first collection of songs that I’ve ever written,” Avery Friedman says about her debut album, New Thing. It is hard to believe that is the case. New Thing sounds like the work of a seasoned veteran, not a newcomer. New Thing is a confident debut with poetic storytelling, intriguingly immersive sound design, catchy hooks, and compelling production.

Friedman chats with OFM about her debut album.

Releasing New Thing and Collaborating with Other Musicians

Friedman knew that she wanted the record title to be one of the songs and briefly considered “Somewhere To Go” before settling on New Thing. “It was probably the first song I wrote that I was like, ‘I love this song,’” she comments. There are other layers to why Friedman selected New Thing as the title. “It felt meta and relevant to the fact that music is so new to me. The song is actually about having a really anxious night, and I just immediately wrote this song, so the subject matter is actually heavy. I feel like, as a title for a debut album, New Thing is cheeky and funny. I just thought it had a lot of personality and what my gut wanted.”

Releasing New Thing and sharing it with the world was not as nerve-wracking as performing live for the first time. “When I was playing my first show, I was literally not eating or sleeping before, and it was an inconsequential backyard show,” recalls Friedman. “I had so much anxiety about performing, opening myself up for judgment, worrying I wasn’t strong enough and that I would be called ‘stupid.‘ It’s just so vulnerable. I have always been scared of singing in front of people. After my first show, I was so anxious that I needed to basically exposure therapy myself. I held myself to playing every month after that and putting in reps. I’m finally at the point where playing is more exciting than nerve-wracking—I’m grateful that by the time it came to put out the record, I felt more secure as a musician, so I wasn’t super burdened by putting it out.”

For New Thing, Friedman worked with James Chrisman (Sister), who produced the record, Felix Walworth (Florist and Told Slant), Ryan Cox (Club Aqua), and Malia DelaCruz (CIAO MALZ). “I had no experience doing anything like this and so little belief in myself, so it was really crucial to have this moral encouragement and people who I respected as musicians telling me they think I have the sauce,” comments Friedman. “From a functional perspective, I didn’t know how to make any of this shit happen. I just owe a lot to the time, energy, and logistics of the musicians I worked with. I deferred to them a lot to how things should go but they also gave me a lot of space to discover my sound.”

Setting the Scene for the Record

New Thing opens with “Into,” a mostly instrumental track with minimal words. It has a stunning guitar riff and a gorgeously haunting atmosphere. “Into” is a great scene setter for the record. “I was playing around in this weird guitar tuning, and I had never written such a melodic guitar line, like, it just kind of holds its own just as a guitar part—It’s kind of an immersive intro to the record,” says Friedman. “I took a songwriting class with Half Waif, and one of the assignments for the class was to put spoken word over an instrumental thing. When I wrote that guitar part, I was like, ‘I feel like this would be really cool with more of an ambient thing.’”

A Desire to Capture a Feeling

Thematically, New Things touches on anxiety, confusion, friendship, romance, nervousness, and queerness, among other things. “Most of these songs were born out of a desire to capture or explore a feeling,” reflects Friedman. “Like with ‘New Thing,’ I’m not necessarily naming it, but I’m just exploring the new sensation of anxiety. Songs like ‘Biking Standing’ or ‘Photo Booth,’ I wanted to encapsulate a more joyful feeling and the electricity of being alive, whether it’s a nighttime bike ride in ‘Biking Standing’ or a fun night out with your friends and specifically experiencing queer chaos for the first time in ‘Photo Booth.’”

One of the standout tracks from the record is the infectiously upbeat and delightfully joyous electropop tune “Photo Booth.” Friedman’s vocals are perfect, and her songwriting, which conveys a sense of nostalgia, is captivating. The song was inspired by a night out Friedman had with her friends. “My friends and I went to this bar, and there was this photo booth, and we just had this crazy night, and the next day, we had a million photo strips to document it,” she smiles. “Photo booths are so interesting and fun because that night it was like, ‘Oh, we’re going in this photo booth. Are we gonna kiss? What’s gonna happen? We only have 20 seconds in here.’ You have to make really impulsive decisions about your poses, but it’s also in this confined space, and you have physical evidence of it.

It just added such a fun and flirty dynamic to that night and was so playful. It was a night of real queer chaos. In a way, I think we were like, ‘Dang. We didn’t really have this in high school.’ It was a little profound for me having this experience of having levity attached to playfulness and queerness in this way and having people who share your identity to experience that with.”

Accessing the Energy of the Demo

Most of the demos for the songs that made up New Thing sounded quite different than the recorded versions. However, it was important to capture the essence of the demos in the recorded versions. “With the production and instrumentation, I always tried to access the energy throughout the song in its barest form—Sonically, they are quite different, but energetically, they are all pretty similar,” shares Friedman.

One example in which Friedman channeled the energy of the demo into the recorded version is “Flowers Fell.” “The chorus is so distinct and triumphant, and even in the introduction and outro, there are such dynamics built into the bare guitar and vocal parts, and I really wanted the production to emphasize that trajectory and make the lows lower, the highs higher, the chaos more chaotic, and the verses obscuring that—emphasizing the emotional trajectory of the song,” she comments. “Some stuff we stumbled upon on accident, like a few things on this record we were just fucking around. James played that crazy distorted guitar part, and we were like, ‘That’s crazy, but that’s also awesome.’

In earlier mixes in the chorus, the fuzzy guitar was so much more intense, which I honestly wanted. I think the verses I envision walking down the street sort of leisurely and reflective. The choruses are just kind of meant to hit you in the face basically and make you feel reckoned. In the end, I really like how it feels like all the instruments are in conversation with each other.”

Playing Around with Sound Design

New Thing combines more “straightforward” recording styles with experimental techniques. “Those elements are very complementary,” says Friedman. “Most of them except ‘Somewhere To Go’ actually have the integrity of a band song—It was really valuable for a lot of these to have the energy of people playing in the room and creating the true bones of it.” Friedman loved the experimental nature of the songs, too. “The sound design stuff was a way for me to trust my instinct because there is no formula. When a band take is bad, like you’re not together, it feels off. But I think the necessity to rely on instinct for a lot of this was very cool and healing, honestly, for me because I’m somebody who is like, ‘I’m gonna make this decision based on logic, what’s right, and what’s smart, so this is just really what feels good, like, when I listen to it, it feels more expressive of whatever I was feeling when I was writing it.”

“Somewhere To Go” almost sounded completely different before Friedman experimented with some sound design. “At first, it was a more straightforward rock song but it didn’t feel—Once the drums weren’t working, we scratched it,” she says. Eventually, the song became more ambient direction with droning noises and intriguing sound design. “One of our last days in the studio, Felix played a trash can; the sound of it just closing and us recording it. A lot of it was trial and error. We just had one fun day screwing around in the studio with my cousin Seth Paris, a sound engineer. He was actually playing on a lot of crazy synths and drones. James is a really skilled sound designer. We just eventually went through and, similarly to ‘Flowers Fell,’ decided to mute things, bring them back, and create this ambient structure based on the flow of the song.

“We had a lot of pieces we were really strategic about. For example, the trash can sound, or there’s one part in ‘Back in the flow / Ephemeral,’ and then there’s a really cool twinkly synth sound. The order of how all this came about was really interesting to me because it was so non-linear. It was like we have all these words and these random sounds that could play throughout the whole time, or we could make it more sparse just to create and release tension, which was a really cool fun part of this.”

How Poetry Influenced the Record

Friedman studied English at the University of Michigan. She tells me that some of the poets and poetry she read through her college classes, such as Emily Dickinson, have been influential in her songwriting. “I love poetry that feels a bit like a riddle or obscuring that is somehow leaning to more vividness, and it’s illuminating more through its obscurity, and it allows for interpretation and provokes thoughtful consideration and analysis in a way that something more straightforward doesn’t require,” reflects Friedman. “Part of it is putting words together that sound good. It is not necessarily about the meaning but the actual sound and rhythm of words together. I think that’s so crucial to my songwriting.”

Friedman’s love of poetry shines through fascinatingly with “Finger Painting.” “This song is a bit of a little riddle, like each line in the verses has a color in it,” she says. “I wrote it out of the anxiety of a new budding romantic situation—It was meant to relay that anticipation of an exciting but boundary-pushing romantic situation or something that felt like uncharted territory. It was the song that felt most like a poem to me where I’m sort of intentional with each line and was like, ‘I’m gonna put a color in each line.”

Concluding Comments

Friedman is very proud of how New Thing turned out. “It marks such a beginning for me and a journey for me for trusting myself, taking risks, and training myself to be safe while pushing myself while being bare in front of people,” she states. “Just owning anxiety, owning elements of sexuality, owning the identity as a musician. It’s so vulnerable to do something like that because to put something out in the world, you’re saying you think it’s worthy of people’s attention and time, which is not something to take for granted. It took me a long time to think music was a worthy thing for me to invest time and energy in, a worthy thing for me to go through emotional agony to pursue, and a worthy thing for people’s ears. It’s something that I know I will never stop doing now. I feel so grateful that I have unlocked this within myself.”