The singing Mitchell twins were together in Gore recently, picking up the overall runner up prize at the Gold Guitar Awards.
The hometown pair, Maegan and Nicola, left the event with a recording invitation prize to boot.
But significantly, they went their separate ways again after the event, Nicola returning to Wellington to continue studies at Massey University, while Maegan continues to live and work in Gore. It’s the first time they’ve lived apart.
The separation has an echo in the song Find a River, which is on their new EP, released yesterday, and for which there is also a recently released video. It was the song they played at the Gold Guitars, where it was also a nominee for a best country song award.
Find a River tells the story of twins kept apart, who find solace in nature, through the connection between the river and the sea.
But in fact, the song is not about them at all.
It was written before Nicola left for Massey, she says, and is instead about the Topp Twins and the tough time they experienced when Covid kept them apart at a time they were both dealing with illness.
"I guess it became a bit more special, to me anyway, when I did leave, because it was our first time living apart," Nicola says.
"But originally it is about the Topp Twins being separated through the pandemic. They couldn’t visit each other when they both had cancer, so that was the inspiration for the story."
The Mitchell family has known the Topps for years, Nicola says, but they’ve been getting to know them better lately. The Topps sent a clip of themselves, by a river, for the new video. And Linda Topp was also in the Gold Guitar audience in Gore for Find a River. There was hardly a dry eye in the house.
The twins are of course little sisters to multi-award winning country music songstress Jenny Mitchell, but it’s the guiding hand of another of New Zealand’s pantheon that’s been closest to the tiller of their new EP, also called Find a River.
"We worked with Tami Neilson to record and co-write and she was our producer for the EP," Nicola says.
There are four songs on the EP, the final one, Alone Again, released online just yesterday.
"We actually did a songwriting session with Tami and wrote two of the songs and finished off the other two.
"We love Tami and we always listen to her music so having her advice throughout the whole project has been really amazing — because we know that whatever she thinks is probably a cool idea."
Find a River features the final chorus in te reo Maori, something Nicola says was natural for them to do.
"Maegan and I have always been quite involved in kapa haka through school, so that’s something we’ve been thinking about and including in our project for a long time."
Find a River lent itself to that treatment, with its focus on the environment and the connection that water provides.
"We worked with a guy called Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, he’s based in Christchurch and does lots of translations."
The Mitchells aren’t the only ones who’ve been singing the song ahead of the EP’s release.
On a recent occasion the twins were ambushed by the year 6 pupils at Gore Main School at an assembly.
"That was pretty cute," Nicola says. "It was actually one of our old primary school teachers who organised it. We didn’t know much about what was happening, then they knew all of the words, including the Māori words."
The video is on their Facebook page.
Maegan and Nicola are on the road now, touring the EP to an Auckland show tonight before playing Dunedin Folk Club tomorrow night.
Gore and Invercargill also get dates.
Nicola says it’s nice that the long period of preparation for the EP’s songs is now complete.
"It is quite nice that they are not just in our brain now," she says, apparently talking of the pair of them in the singular.
Despite their relative separation this year, she hasn’t had to take her own advice and find a river to remain connected to Maegan, she says.
"We tend to talk a lot actually. We’ll call each other probably once a day or every other day or over FaceTime, so there’s not really much time apart that we are not still really communicating, so it has not been too bad. But the odd time I do think about the song when we have busy things on and haven’t been talking to each other."
The gig
- The Mitchell Twins play the Dunedin Folk Club, tomorrow night, Opoho Bowling Club rooms, 80 Lovelock Ave.
