Tune in on Wednesday, May 17th @ 2PM when Excuse My French speaks with psych-folk singer-songwriter, Mariee Siou. Siou plays Ashkenaz in Berkeley on Friday, May 19th.
Mariee Siou’s highly anticipated EP, Circle of Signs, explores the grief that comes with the current, various political, cultural and environmental disasters. Over four poignant tracks, Siou reckons with living within a system that deepens inequality and accelerates the global climate emergency and through lyrics and song, offers a path toward healing and attempts to maintain hope of a brighter future.
Siou has learned to more consciously embrace her role in the old and new tradition of healer-singers who have always helped hold the human social fabric together. Through music she attempts to fill a cultural void left by severed connections to her mixed Hungarian, and Mestiza heritages and to thereby address the broader cultural voids felt by Americans today. She does this “with hopes of enticing the sacred work of grief back into our lives from the exile American society has placed it in”.
The songs continue to come to Mariee, and her approach as a singer continues to mature. The flowing melodies and quivering vibrato of her voice, as well as the poetry itself, continue to locate themselves and their work with a more solidly grounded precision as to just what that work is. Her most recent songs most deeply reflect this clarity of vision and acceptance of both her role as an artist and the endless need for that role in this changing world. She brings us back to the child and the grandmother in ourselves, in a time in which it has never been more needed—and she intends to keep it up as long as she has a voice.
Photo credit: Nicolas Stokes