Hailing from Ohio and now based in New York, Maria BC is a songwriter with influences across the musical gamut. Classically trained as a mezzo-soprano, they utilise pop sensibilities with the elegance and weight of artists like Grouper, leading to a sound that blurs the line between sparse and grand arrangements. The result is an interrogation of preconceptions, exploring how quietness might hold great intensity, and intimacy come with its own mystery and strangeness.
Nowhere is this clearer than on Devil’s Rain, an EP out with Fear of Missing Out Records this coming February. Recorded during the locked-down spring, the project came alive with what they describe as “extraordinary urgency,” becoming an obsessive work that could not be explained by the surfaces of pandemic-induced anxiety or boredom. Forced to sing quietly so as not to disturb the neighbours, there’s a hushed atmosphere to the songs, but this does not represent a retreat away from the outer world. “Nothing about it is comforting,” Maria BC says. “Music just seems necessary for whatever reason.”
If the process was intensely personal, then the songs themselves follow suit. Devil’s Rain is an EP of intimacy and earnestness, the songs woven with a gentle patience that evokes a candid atmosphere. Music that is introspective yet unguarded, probing into themes as weighty as memory and religion with intuition and care. Maria BC challenged themselves in order to focus on this style, the enforced quietness becoming something actively pursued. “Normally I belt when I sing,” they say. “It constrained the melodies I could write, knowing I would need to be singing quietly, and it meant I couldn’t rely on certain old tricks to craft an arc.”
Today we’re delighted to share the release’s first single, ‘Adelaide’. Confronting introspection head on, the song is inspired by a friend’s experimentation with memory palaces, a novel method of enhancing information recall. As Maria BC explains: “A friend of mine used to work as a museum guard. Guests would almost never ask her questions, so she had a lot of downtime.” The friend would spend hours each shift constructing these palaces, aiming for total autobiographical memory. But on hearing of this, another friend raised an interesting question. Is it possible to put too much effort into recalling the details of your life? Can a person become lost in their own interiority? “I thought, damn, that’s so true,” Maria BC continues. “I’ve seen that happen to so many people. It’s happened to me many times—this feeling that I’m stuck in the architecture of my own ego.”
‘Adelaide’ is therefore not about the museum guard, rather the questions that arose from their ideas. “It’s a song addressed to a depressed version of myself,” Maria BC says, “or someone who needs a hand to pull them back into the social world.” The muted softness of the sound belies the urgency at its heart, not to mention the thorned truths it chooses to grasp, but for all of the conflicting emotion of the track, the enduring impression is that of compassion. And seeing as there can be no compassion without others, the song reveals the intentions behind Maria BC’s introspection. Not some retreat into a personal interior, but an attempted communication from that space in an attempt to reconnect beyond its lonely borders.
Photo by Sergio Gutierrez