Mariee Sioux - Grief in Exile

Mariee Sioux is an artist transmitting medicinal qualities of music for the current times we are in. Her finger-picking guitar has been compared to the greats of Nick Drake and Bert Jansch and her music has also been described as hallucinatory with a trance like performance. Her first album Faces in the Rocks (2007) is considered a cult classic and garnered attention from such artists as Mazzy Star and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Poetic mysticism and ancestral remembrance have always been deeply embedded in Mariee Sioux's music. Coming from mixed races of Polish, Hungarian, and Native American heritage she has always been fascinated by her ancestry and has recently become involved in local and national indigenous activism. Mariee was raised in the small gold mining town of Nevada City that resides on occupied Nisenan territory in Northern California. In her early years Mariee's father, a mandolin and guitar player, took the family to bluegrass and music festivals where his band often played. Music started to find a more personal place in her life when she taught herself to play guitar at 18 years old. Soon after she took her Dad's guitar on an isolating and influential trip to Argentina where she traveled alone and volunteered with indigenous Mapuche children. This was where the convergence of words, melody, and channeling began and is when Mariee wrote her first songs. During her 20s, seeking relief for from alcoholism and depression, she started to explore the worlds of plant medicine and ceremonial ways to find healing. These medicine ways were life changing and continue to be an important part of her path. There is a maturity and deepening sense of self in the nature of Mariee Sioux's recent songwriting. Her third album Grief in Exile feels like a culmination of these profound experiences and strike the listener as much more refined, less stream of consciousness and abstract. This new collection of songs shares stories of deeply intimate and relatable feelings on heartbreak, loss, indigenous prophecy, and the need to welcome grief back into our lives for the health of society."Fans of acoustic guitar-playing female singer-songwriters are so flooded with options these days that they are in the position to be pretty discriminating. Artists such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, Jana Hunter, and Mariee Sioux have issued a steady stream of quality music, and have collectively set a fairly high standard for newcomers to match." -Pitchfork