Singing Florence twins moved to Nashville as teens to pursue music dream. Now it's coming true. - Burlington County Times

Two singing, fire-fighting Florence sisters have been working quietly in the music industry for decades. Their first single, under the stage name Polar Grace, came out this month and is already making waves.

FLORENCE — The first time MaryAnn Coulter heard her debut single played on the radio this month, she started crying at her desk.

In the late 1990s, she and her twin sister Diane Carey-Stranko, both Florence natives, moved to Nashville, Tennessee, at age 19 with just about $1,000. After decades of hard work and obstacles in the music industry, the twins felt as if they‘d finally made it.

Signed under the stage name Polar Grace to United Alliance Music Group, part of Sony, the twins have been Christian recording artists since 2018, and their first single, “Wish I Could Love Like That,” came out on Jan. 24. It‘s now getting heavy rotation on iHeartRadio, Apple Christian Radio, and Life Radio here in New Jersey.

“We come from a great town,” Coulter said. “They‘ve been our biggest supporters. They’re always there, and they’ve always believed in us.”

“We knew eventually we‘d be moving on, and we always knew some type of greatness was ahead, but we sacrificed a lot, and we missed a lot with our family. It’s been amazing and rewarding, but its been a hard journey.”

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The recent success won‘t come as much of a surprise to those who knew the twins growing up. They’ve always been ambitious. They worked for the township, succeeded in high school sports and music, and even went through the fire academy to become the township’s first junior female firefighters in 1995.

“I liked it,” Carey-Stranko said of their stint as firefighters. “Mary didn‘t, but I did. She’s the more laid back one and I‘m the adventurous one.”

“There should be a movie about us,” Coulter said with a sigh. “We‘re a hot mess.”

The sisters got their start as musicians locally in Florence by singing in their church choir at St. Clare Church, and joined a band at age 13. They even performed on the “Al Albert’s Showcase” that used to air in Philadelphia, spending Wednesday nights after school recording the weekend TV show.

“Music was always part of our lives,” Carey-Stranko said. “We traveled at the age of 13 with a band. We sang at weddings, bars, receptions — now I think to myself, ‘that was amazing at that age.’”

The twins continued their musical training at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, but had to leave in the middle of their second year when they found out their father, former councilman and fire chief Clark Carey, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma. They helped take care of him until he passed away in June 1994.

“My father told us, ‘I want you to have a good life and be the best you can be,’ and he wanted us to move to Nashville,” Coulter recalled.

Contacted for an audition by a management team from a major record label, they thought they were about to get their big break after months of flying back and forth from their New Jersey home. They performed a song they wrote about their father called “What Will Be, Will Be.”

“We sang that song live while I played the piano in front of the head of A&R, and that‘s how we got our developmental deal,” Coulter recalled. “It’s pretty wild.”

Just months after signing the deal, however, they were dropped, and continued to have close calls with record label auditions over the next few years, but didn‘t have any luck. At one point, they’d gotten as far as landing a deal, but the president of the label who signed them was let go just days later, and the deal fell through, Coulter said.

“We went on to audition for Capitol and Mercury, and it just never seemed like the right time,” Coulter said. “Everything‘s in God’s time.”

They worked other jobs in real estate and property management, had children and even created a foundation to help other families affected by cancer in the meantime, but stayed involved in Nashville‘s music industry, working alongside producers on demos of songs to pitch to bigger artists in bluegrass, gospel and Christian contemporary.

The behind-the-scenes work ultimately led the sisters to their current record deal with United Alliance as Christian artists. And through the demo work she‘d done, Coulter said she’d found the perfect song for herself when she first heard “Wish I Could Love Like That,” which was written by bluegrass songwriters Jason Eustice and Paula Breedlove.

“We definitely wanted to be country artists originally,” Carey-Stranko said. “We competed at the Teen Arts Festival at Rutgers every year, and our vocal coach Robert Edwin was a judge. He told us, ‘you girls are country artists.’ But we were actually trained for Broadway.”

“We were all over the place, musically,” she said with a laugh. “Versatile, I guess you could call it.”

But decades later, the twins, now in their 40s, have found through life experience that contemporary Christian is just the right fit for them.

At age 21, Coulter was in a life-threatening car accident while driving to pick up a paycheck.

“Going 60 miles an hour, my car hydroplaned. Prior to me getting in the accident, I didn‘t have my seatbelt on. And I heard — and you’re going to think this is crazy — I heard as loud as day, ‘Put your seatbelt on.’ I put it on, I clipped it, and less than a minute and a half later, my car started hydroplaning down a huge hill. And all I could get out was ‘Our Father.’”

It‘s just one experience that Coulter said has reminded her of God’s presence in her life.

“I’m trying to rewind and remember everything that happened,” Carey-Stranko added. “There are so many important parts of our journey, the ups, downs, laughter and tears, the falling apart and pulling back together. All along, the one constant in our life, first of all, was God, and family, music and friends.”

Faith and supportive family and friends, both in Tennessee and New Jersey, have kept the twins going in spite of the obstacles they faced in the industry and their personal lives. Coulter said their mother constantly reminds them all the time that blues singer Bonnie Raitt made her commercial breakthrough when she was in her 40s.

“I said ‘no way,’ I will never do that in my 40s, but by gosh, I am 45 and I have my first single being played on the radio,” Coulter said. “I never expected this.”

“The music we do is from the heart. I have a good job, I do well and I don‘t need the money,” she added. “I don’t need to be famous. This isn‘t about us, it’s about something greater.”

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