Marian Call: Real Alaskan Girl, at least to this Canadian

By James Leask

Photo by Brian Adams, http://baphotos.com

00. Avocado lover, word nerd, typewriter percussionist

Marian Call laughs a lot. Now, that wouldn’t normally be a really big thing per se, but after something like her 49 > 50 Tour (“I call it the 49-50 Tour, but 49>50 is my little math joke in there”), where she drove across and played in all 50 states and most Canadian provinces, I’m genuinely impressed. I fall asleep on the couch around 5 nights a week after a hard few hours of being an Internet Grumpus, and I’m legitimately impressed by Call’s ability to drive for 7 months, charm one last audience and then sit down for an interview without once resorting to anything resembling an excuse for the exhaustion that I certainly wouldn’t begrudge her.

Call was in Edmonton on her way home after the lengthy tour, filling a local comic book store with a crowd of fans, eager to spend an evening listening to great songs from someone who makes jokes like, “I’m the anti-diva. It’s like matter and anti-matter. If I see another soprano, she disappears.” She’s funny and charming, she sings songs inspired by sci-fi shows and you should absolutely buy every single one of her albums right now or we’re not friends anymore.

Afterward, she and I sat down to talk about her tour and a successful 2010, as well as her writing process, the power of Twitter and what to expect from her next album, Something Fierce, due sometime soon.

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01. The 49>50 Tour

C!TB: So, what was the idea for the 49>50 tour? Alaska was the 49^th state, right?

Marian: Yeah, Alaska was the 49^th state and Hawaii is last, too, so that gives it a special symbolism because Hawaii’s the 50^th state, so, “49-50.” [Call finished the tour with a winter show in Hawaii.] The reason for the tour, it was two things: One was I just wasn’t getting a lot of purchase with fans, I wasn’t getting traction booking my shows, and I require a lot of fan help to book shows. I can’t come to a city if one or two people don’t help me out, and I just wasn’t getting a lot of feedback. People will tell me, “Come to our city!” and that’s great, I just need one person to help me set up a show in that city because I don’t live there. And it just wasn’t happening, so I wasn’t kind of getting anywhere, and I was trying to think of how to reframe it or how to make it fit, and I kind of drew a little doodle on the map and I thought, You know what? I could hit all 50 if I really drive. It was my first time that I wanted to hit the Midwest and the East Coast, and I knew I would hit the West and the West Coast because I always do, and that I could hit all 50, and I just ran it by Twitter to see what they would say, and the response was tremendous, and I thought, Okay, this is how I’m going to do it.

C!TB: I think everyone kind of likes the idea of their favourite musician coming to their town.

Marian: Well, I was coming there anyway, like, I was already on trajectory to hit all these places, but I think it made it register for people, “She’s coming to play near me!” and I was like, Well, that was the point, originally, before I did the 50 states thing, but it registered for them, I think, when I said “50 states.” And people got excited.

C!TB: What do you miss out on when you’re on the road for 7 months at a time?

Marian: The psychological toll is pretty high, actually. It’s rough. Familiarity, even in the most basic sense. Like, you’ve never been in a place you’ve been and you’ve never met the people you’re seeing, sometimes I’ll go 3 or 4 weeks without seeing someone I know, or I’ve ever seen before, even, which is pretty intense. That’s hard, and when you’re traveling, you go to Europe for a week, you know, you might at least get to know your neighborhood or your barista or the clerk at your grocery store or the people at your hotel; you at least have something familiar. And in this kind of tour I have had very little of that, it’s very weird when I stay in a place 2 or 3 days, it’s not very often I get to do that, so that’s been hard. I also don’t get to do nearly as much touristy stuff as I would like to do. There’s just so much work and so much driving and it’s such a speed, that people are like, “Oh, you really need to see this about my town,” and then I get all excited because I want to see it, but I can’t. I don’t have the time. Hopefully in the future.

C!TB: So how do you stay sane, then; it’s really draining, kind of disorienting, like, how do you stay you on the road, really?

Marian: [Laughs] Well, Twitter helps. Twitter helps a lot, actually, because I have some people I know there. They say that the hardest moments of being alone are when you see something awesome and have no-one to stare it with, you know? And I have Twitter to share it with, so that really helps, actually, helps me process things. The other thing I guess would probably be good music.

02. Straight-up road trippin’

C!TB: What are your favourite memories that stick out from the last seven months?

Marian: Oh my… there’s a few. Well, I’m going to collect my thoughts, hopefully, in Hawaii. I’ve been taking little notes most places I’ve gone, I’ve slacked a little bit lately, but hopefully I’ll pick it up again. I just have these vivid images; when you say a state, a name of any state, I have this vivid image pop into my head now. All of these places are real to me. And that’s really, really different. New Orleans was a revelation. It was amazing, I’d never been. New York was fantastic and I feel like I got a very deep sense of the New York Experience including how difficult it is. New Jersey? Beautiful, once you get off the turnpike and out of Newark. It’s gorgeous to be out in rural New Jersey. It was beautiful. Seeing the leaves changing all over New England was amazing, actually. Getting poured on in Portland, Maine. Having a huge turnout in Minneapolis at one of my first shows, which was really, totally unexpected. We had a ton of people and it was an amazing show. Scrambling to get 5 or 6 people to a show other days and feeling very lucky if we did [Laughs]. People’s generosity everywhere. So many awesome things, it’s hard to pick a few.

C!TB: How did your views of, say, Canada or the US change as you were going through it?

Marian: Well, it’s funny as I was never very interested in the US. I was never very interested in my own country, I was much more curious about places abroad and about Alaska, because Alaska’s interesting, let’s face it. But I was much more interested in other countries than the US. Now I find myself suddenly going all over the US, and it gave me a very deep impression of how diverse it is and how deeply people everywhere kind of want the same things. Sort of what a mess we’re in; the dual impression was how beautiful the people are everywhere and at the same time how completely unsustainable our lifestyle is in every respect. Canada has been fantastic, I only grew up basically seeing Vancouver and Victoria of Canada, that was my only impression of Canada until I started driving the ALCAN, and driving the ALCAN, I got more of a feel for kind of rural, out-on-the-road Canada than any of the big cities. Now, I have been to all of the largest metro areas in Canada; I haven’t hit the Maritimes yet.

C!TB: Neither have I, and I’m Canadian, so…

Marian: Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting to me, a lot more Canadians that I’ve met – it could just me who I’ve met – but fewer Canadians that I’ve met have gone on monstrous road trips all across their own country. I found that people in Ontario kind of stay in Ontario or visit the States, and then people in the Prairie Provinces sometimes go to other cities, but I met a lot more people here than anywhere else who hadn’t really left. And people in Vancouver would kind of fly elsewhere – they’d fly to Europe or they’d fly to the US or go down the west coast, but a lot of them had never been to anywhere except maybe Toronto.

It was just interesting to me because the US has such a road tripping culture, among young people especially, this is why I noticed it, we hop in the car and go places, it’s what you do [Laughs]. It was different. But no, I really, really enjoyed the deeper view of Canada. I want to get into Quebec more, definitely, it’s fascinating. Montreal was fabulous.

03. w00tstock, Thinkgeek

C!TB: So how did you get involved with things like W00tstock or Thinkgeek?

Marian: [Laughs] That was awesome! Great show. Thinkgeek and w00tstock both got in touch with me, actually. W00tstock, I was just in Austin, TX and I got a phone call from Paul of Paul and Storm asking me if I wanted to do w00tstock, and I was like, “Are… you… serious? Are you sure you have the right number?” I told him, “I don’t have that many fans, I really don’t, I’m not a known performer,” and they said, “Yes, but you are the most recommended person we’ve ever had, so clearly you have the right fans.” And I like that verdict. I love my fans; they are the right fans. And Thinkgeek, I was actually complaining at them because there was a Crest of Hyrule shirt that I really wanted in a women’s cut because I don’t wear men’s cut t-shirts, and they didn’t have it and couldn’t make it, and they were sorry. We had a few tweets back and forth about it, they were sorry they couldn’t get it made, and I was like, “Oh, that’s OK, I’m gonna buy one anyway and get it tailored.” Which I am. But then a couple weeks later, they got in touch with me when I was looking for something in the DC area and just said, “Hey, you want to play at Thinkgeek?” and I was like, “Of course I want to play at Thinkgeek, how could I not?” Both of those really came about because the Browncoats have been so supportive. I mean, there have been a lot of supportive geeks along the way, but the Browncoats particularly have been really supportive, and followers of Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, both of those groups have probably been the most instrumental.

04. Albums, y’all!

C!TB: So I know a lot of your songs are about things like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly, and (a) that’s awesome, and (b) how did that kind of start? Was that kind of a conscious decision or something that naturally happened?

Marian: The first couple sort of naturally happened. I wrote them two songs for a contest about Saffron from Firefly. I just tend to sneak in references from other things. The lexicons of various series will get stuck in my mind and come out in my songs. I just let it come out, along with a lot of other references like Shakespeare or Neruda or T.S. Eliot. Then Quantum Mechanix heard this – they make cool licensed props from a few series – and they heard some of my songs and they actually commissioned a bunch more [Call’s second album, Got to Fly], so the reason I started to write more was really because they asked me to. But it turns out to be really fun, I take a lot of inspiration from fiction, I think it’s natural to see great art and want to make more art, you know? Make art in response. And it was easy for me.

C!TB: So after a commissioned album like Got to Fly, what will Something Fierce be like?

Marian: I hope people aren’t disappointed, it’s a little less overtly geeky, but it’s definitely still geeky. I’ve been on kind of a NASA kick so there’s a lot of astronomy stuff in it. It’s a two-part project, and one of them – the shorter album – is going to be about Alaska, a lot of stuff about Alaska. Some humorous, some very serious, and the thing that carries through is that there’s a lot of literary geek stuff. I love to play with words, and there’s a lot of bizarre rhyme schemes and meters and tricks I’m trying to play with words. Music geeks will get a kick out of it too, but then I think regular geeks will like it as well as long as they’re not expecting it to be the same as my commissioned album, you know, it’s a very clever, very left brain, kind of educated sound, and I think that most of my fans - most that I’ve talked to thus far anyway - enjoy that kind of stuff as well as the sort of franchise-oriented.

05. The Donors’ Circle and patronage

C!TB: So, do things like the Donors’ Circle [Call’s “Zombie Cheerleader” initiative to help fund her business] play a role in how you write songs, or how you make an album?

Marian: Absolutely. The Donors’ Circle is everything about how I make an album. They’re an amazing bunch of people. First of all, they take us back to the patronage system, which I really believe in, because the patronage system allowed an artist to do what they do, but it also puts the burden on the artist to keep doing a good job or they lose their patronage. It keeps the burden on the artist to produce high quality work.

C!TB: Isn’t patronage the original system?

Marian: Absolutely. Patronage and localized community-based, like having a village fiddler. And the community is supporting him because he’s the village fiddler. I think people are scrambling to find all sorts of different ways to fund new albums. I feel like the patronage system is really just the most honest without going into debt. I feel like these people believe in my work or they wouldn’t have, you know, I never begged them to put money up, they voluntarily did. They believe in my work enough to hope the next one’s going to be good and they’ve made it possible for me to record this far without having to go into debt, which is really a big deal, because I have crippling debt right now, and I can’t accrue any more, and this will help a lot.

06. This is a blog about comics. It’s Comics! The Blog!

C!TB: You mentioned earlier that you’ve got some favourite series you’re trying to catch up on.

Marian: Oh, I’m very new to the comics universe, and I probably started with what some people would say are typical girl comics, but I just think they’re typical good comics. I’ve read Fables and Y: The Last Man. I’m behind on Fables now. I’ve started Astro City, and I’ve started Scott Pilgrim because that was my favorite movie in the universe. I love it. What else have I got? I’ve been reading some Alan Moore. I read Watchmen, of course, and then I’ve started to read a couple other of his series. And Umbrella Academy is amazing and I really want more of it.

C!TB: It came out of nowhere.

Marian: It’s so incredible!

C!TB: I knew him as the member of the band I didn’t really like, and [Brandon] just said, “You are going to read this.” It was the first thing he ever told me to read, and I was like, What is this? I want more! And I came back the next day and bought the next book.

Marian: Yeah, it’s fantastic. What else did I just start… Morning Glories! I like it, that promises to be really exciting. Honestly, I feel like I grew up without the classic superhero or DC/Marvel hero universes, I didn’t really grow up with that, except, well, probably Batman.

C!TB: Everybody grew up with Batman, it’s that weird cultural mythology.

Marian: Yeah, and Batman has really gotten deeper into the psyche of the United States, and Canada, and Superman too. They’ve gotten so deeply rooted in our culture, but I grew up not knowing X-Men, not knowing those, and so I kind of want to. I need to find a friend who has a really good comic collection back home, you know, because I can’t afford to buy all those. And go read some of the classics, the essential collections so that I have a notion of some of the back catalog of some of these characters. I really do want to. You know, I like the X-Men. I want to know them, but reading with the series that has that long history you can’t just pick up anywhere. I feel like I have a lot of back reading to do, this will make a nice winter for me, I think.

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XX. Outro

Call finished by telling me about being turned into a comic for Geek A Week and the possibility of being on a beer (“There’s a beer coming out in Anchorage that someone’s interested in using me as the model for the label and that would be so awesome! I think it’s going to be a red. I hope. We’ll see.”) It was a pretty damn awesome night.

Man, now I kind of want a Marian Call beer. Get on that, world.

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Visit Marian Call’s website here.

And follow her on Twitter, why not?