Meeting Is Over is a stripped-down, acoustic anthem that celebrates the cycles of life and death, endings and renewal, farewells and reunion. A perfect song then to bid farewell to 2021 and to look forward to new horizons in 2022. This release is a cross-continental collaboration between two soulful and expressive singer/songwriters, Piers Faccini (France) and Moira Smiley (USA). Both artists are well known for partnering with many leading musical lights – Smiley with Tune-Yards, Solas, and Sam Amidon; Faccini with Ben Harper, Camille, and Don La Nena.
Smiley and Faccini—separately chosen for Songlines’ Top Of The World 2021—both released critically acclaimed albums this year. This is the first time the two have collaborated in the studio.
Meeting Is Over is an old American song about “meeting on the other shore”. Driven by Smiley on the banjo with Faccini on fretless guitar and the West African guembri, the single also features Irish multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan on guitar.
The haunting and yet comforting style of Smiley and Faccini’s singing reflects on goodbyes with those we love the most and the ebb and flow of togetherness that life presents.
Moira shared the following:
When I first heard Piers sing – on a snowy night in NYC – I was deeply moved by the way his high notes keened and spun as if he had access to a collective grief we’d forgotten. I feel that expression of grief to be part of the work of singing – whether wild and expressionist or gentle – so I knew that ‘Meeting Is Over’ would be the perfect song for us to sing together.
This arrangement started with me making the rolling, hypnotic banjo part while I was singing the song in 2020. Seamus and I sat down to play one night, and he found a guitar part that fit to the banjo like a glove. We sent these sounds to Piers and he sent a treasure chest of instrumental and vocal sounds back from his recording studio in France. I put it all together and finished it with my longtime collaborator, Dave Weber of Airtime Studios.
This is how I want to cross over into the new year – holding memorial for the farewells and preparing to arrive on new ground.
The video came together quickly when I encountered my friend’s storybook-like boat on our nearby Lake Champlain. With the deft, musical video editing of longtime collaborator, Ben Guzmán, we told this story of intimacy on the journey as inspired by two of my favorite films, ‘Roma’ and ‘Babette’s Feast’.
And a little history…I learned this old Appalachian, ‘camp meeting’ song when I was 10 or 11 years old, and wow, was it the perfect song for a kid to learn about life’s cycle of sadness and reassurances with verses of goodbye and choruses of ‘…we’ll land on the shore and be safe forevermore’. I believe my version is tied to the early 1960s field recording of singer, Buna Hicks in Beech Mountain, North Carolina via the Amidon family.
Video edited by Ben Guzmán
Meeting is Over is available everywhere December 30, 2021.
Moira Smiley | Piers Faccini | Seamus Egan