This is her 'Magic' moment
Like many working musicians, Caithlin De Marrais is multitasking, traveling from one gig to another while squeezing in interviews where she can. But on the phone from the road, the singer has suddenly found herself in surroundings she didn't quite anticipate.
"We just pulled off the road," she says. "We were trying to find a nice little place, anticipating your call, and we probably found the worst place imaginable. It's this indoor shooting range in North Carolina. So we're hearing reports of the rifles being shot behind us."
De Marrais, who plays the Middle East on Tuesday, is used to rolling with the unexpected. At the University of Wisconsin, future Rainer Maria bandmate Kyle Fischer drafted her to play bass before she'd ever picked up the instrument, leading to an acclaimed career for the indie-rock band (first in Madison, Wis., then in Brooklyn) that lasted well over a decade until a split two years ago. And she recorded her solo debut, the new "My Magic City," largely without a net, teaching many of the songs to the musicians as the tape started rolling. In fact two of them, "The Cottage" and "April You Changed Your Mind" were recorded as they were written.
The entire process took less than a week. "Why do you record music in any other way? This is the best way," De Marrais says, laughing. "Just bring some friends together and eat some food and play some music, everyone feels good, go home."
The results sound so far removed from the electric urgency of her former band that even someone familiar with De Marrais might not recognize her new music. She says that - with the exception of the sweet and empathetic "Terrified," which made it onto Rainer Maria's 2006 swan song "Catastrophe Keeps Us Together" - her solo material simply didn't fit her old group. And indeed, the largely acoustic "My Magic City" is delicate, relaxed, and ornate in a way her old band never was.
The biggest difference lies in De Marrais's vocals, which are closer to the breathy, soothing tones of Kathleen Edwards and Suzanne Vega than the pleading yelp she used to produce over Rainer Maria's din. "It propelled me like a rocket in a way that, if I had started writing songs on my own from the beginning, if there was no Rainer Maria, I might have chosen a quieter route."
Fischer, who played on and coproduced "My Magic City," agrees. "[Rainer Maria] has a triumphalism and also this . . . not exactly indignation, but this combination of calling somebody out and rising above," he says. "Whereas the place that Caithlin's singing from on this record is a totally different place emotionally, and it requires the listener to come a lot closer to her, until you get a totally different sense of who she is."
That may be, but De Marrais insists that "My Magic City" is a continuation of the path she was already on. "I haven't transformed into a different person," she says. "I feel all the natural progression, the similarities. But my life has definitely changed a lot since Rainer Maria ended. I got married. I'm expecting our first child. I became a yoga teacher. A lot of amazing, wonderful changes. So that definitely has influenced this record and where my music is going now. It's given me a lot of confidence to go on." 