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Upcoming Shows
Roadside Graves
w/Bart Budwig
FRIDAY, Aug. 6, 9PM
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Stereopathic on Hypem
Jun
19
When I opened the door to The Studio last Tuesday night, it was mostly empty and mostly dark. Any faces I could make out in the dimness were bruding or apathetic. Everything seemed to scream, “You are not welcome here but that’s fine because nobody really cares, anyway.” The Studio is actually the basement of the famed Webster Hall in New York City. I was there to see Mariee Sioux, a singer/songwriter whose existence I learned about from a suggestion on Seeqpod about a year ago. A guy who goes by the name Zomes and the band Brightblack Morning Light were also on the bill.
The room started to fill up a bit and shortly after I checked out the merch table, Mariee got up on the stage and introduced herself to her silent, staring, blinking audience. By the middle of her second song, everyone had started pulling their chairs out into what was formerly a giant openness in front of the stage. By the end of her third song, the place looked like it was full. People were sitting close to one another, some were Indian-style on the ground, others had cushions or chairs. Everyone was looking up at Mariee, listening intently. When Mariee asked one of her friends on tour with her to play guitar on a couple of songs, he emerged from the audience, grabbed his guitar, and returned right back to where he had been sitting. He didn’t get up on stage. He stood and played in place, facing the stage with the rest of the audience, staring at Mariee, and Mariee stared back while she played and sang. At this time, the stage, although elevated, was stripped of its purpose as some sort of separation or boundary. One woman in the very front drooped her head down and put her hand up in the air, her palm reaching out toward the stage. She swayed her skull slowly from side to side like a Pentecostal congregant responding to a powerful prayer. Toward the end of Mariee’s set, it hit me that most of these people sitting around me were the same people that had been there from the very beginning but where they had seemed like snobby strangers when I first walked in, they now seemed like fellow feasters at a large dinner party in a warm and glowing home–and Mariee was the hostess.
Mariee (pronounced just like Marie) Sioux hails from Nevada City, California. She did not grow up on a reservation or with a traditional Indian upbringing. “My mom’s half Paiute Indian…from Southern California. [She] went through a phase in her life when she was my age, kind of searching for her Native American past and stuff and got really sad and frustrated with it because there were just no records of her people. Her grandma didn’t register with the normal registration that most Indian people had to do to get recognized by the government, so they’re kind of just like a disappeared family, and a lot of people have that situation with families, like if you didn’t register when they told you, ‘Be here in this town and register,’ if you lived 10 miles away and didn’t have a horse or any way to get anywhere, then you are nothing and you’re pretty much forgotten. There’s some stories of family members and stuff but it’s pretty hard to track back.”
Sounding like a mix of the earthy songwriters from the ‘70s (Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffy St. Marie) in her vocal style/harmonies and as organic as Joanna Newsom (Newsom’s ‘Ys’ album, specifically) in her Americana-y melodic structures and musical patterns, Mariee is a storyteller in the old folk tradition. Her songs contain elements of the mythical, the political, as well as the autobiographical, with recurring themes of twinship and woodland lore. During our interview, a fan passing by embraced Mariee and told her how much the newts in Sioux’s most recently written song had inspired her. Of her lyrics, Sioux said, “A lot of it is really personal for me and also really worldly messages for people, for humanity. I’d say that a lot of my songs are actually kind of political but it’s maybe more subtle or more metaphorical words… I definitely have messages behind it. I’m not very good at being like, ‘THIS IS MY MESSAGE!’ People are always asking, ‘What’s this mean?’ Sometimes, I’m like, ‘…That one’s just a crazy thing in my heart.’”
Blackbright Morning Light, the header on the bill, are a heavy psychadelic jam-esque band from New Mexico via Alabama, and Mariee has been on the road with them for at least a year now. They saw her play at the Big Sur Festival about 3 years ago and invited her to come on their tour. She has toured with them several times since. “I play lots of shows with them and we’re both equally supportive of our own journeys… I think people leave with a really different feeling and that’s all we’re trying to do, I think, in the end,” she said of their shared vision.
“Homeopathic stereo static” is the chorus from one of Mariee’s latest songs and she was very excited to be doing an interview for Stereopathicmusic.com. “That is crazy! Whoa! That’s like the complete mix of the songs…” She said she might be willing to have “Homeopathic” up on the site somewhere once the song is finally recorded, which she predicts will probably happen sometime in the next year. “Homeopathic is about—well, homeopathy is a form of medicine using bits of the ailment to cure the ailment itself. It’s a pretty interesting thing.” Don’t we know it!
Mariee Sioux’s album, ‘Faces in the Rocks,’ is available now on iTunes through Grass Roots Record Co. (based out of Nevada City, CA.) I would also recommend the two-song ‘Two Tongues at One Time’ single, which contains live versions of the 2 songs with a dash more percussion. Mariee and Brightblack Morning Light played at the Northside Festival in Williamsburg in Brooklyn a few days after this show. She has 2 more tour dates this month in the Northeast before flying over to Europe, where she will be playing assorted festivals.
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Mariee Sioux - “Buried In Teeth” mp3
Nathan Asher lives in New York, where he works for an educational research firm and scours the City for good espresso. He has an appreciation for old and curious things, and he likes his music loud: www.myfloatinghome.wordpress.com
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