Words by Todd Olmstead//Illustration by Elliot Kurtz
Khaela Maricich doesn’t know what to make of it. “It’s weird…my mom really loves my new record. Normal people can get into it.”

Who exactly are these normal people? Perhaps the people of Marfa, Texas, a small artists’ community in rural West Texas where she had just completed a brief stint supporting Jenny Lewis. If it seems an odd place to take an indie rock tour, that’s because it is. But these are the kind of audiences that a record like Paper Television can reach by operating on the fringes of both pop music and avant-garde music. There are moments on the new record that approach absolute pop bliss, such as the chorus on “Parentheses,” or the closing ballad, “True Affection.” These are places where the melody grabs hold of you and forces its way into your psyche. But for as melodically-oriented as certain songs are, this is an album that’s decidedly more left-of-center than any mainstream pop (which, ironically, has little to do with melody anymore). Quirkier and less romantic than the Postal Service, the Blow write synth-pop songs that are almost about love, but everything has a strange slant to it. “The Big U” references a threesome with her lover’s obsession with the universe, while “Fists Up” contains comparisons between her love and the Louvre.

Maricich’s unique perspective is intrinsically tied to her background as a performance and visual artist. Perhaps most notably beyond her work with the Blow, she wrote a solo opera entitled “Blue Sky vs. Night Sky,” behind which she has toured the United States. This performance attitude doesn’t necessarily lend itself traditionally to pop music, but Maricich tries to access it from an unconventional standpoint by re-imagining the traditional rock venue as more of a performance art venue. These days she is taking a more minimal approach to performing, “Everything big I started to plan overshadowed the music. There’s something way more potent about just singing the songs. There’s no need for some big spectacle. This is what we made. We made these songs, and here I am.” The reason for taking the Blow on the road as a solo act is more incidental than anything, though. Her writing and recording partner, Jona Bechtolt, happens to be off doing his own thing in YACHT, his mixed/new media performance outlet. For Maricich, there are strengths to touring both ways.

“Jona is a giver, and really taught me to throw myself energetically into every performance,” she said.

Having learned reckless abandon from him, she spoke confidently of exploring “more subtle realms of what arises out of me” in an intimate and powerful setting, despite her half-joking admission that the shows are a little bit like karaoke.

So how does she define herself? Pop musician? Performance artist? Do those two personalities interact? “I tried to reorganize, but they’re all mixed up at this point. You are who you are, and that organic form is going to blow you all over the place.” Because of the spontaneity and careless nature of pop shows, the indie concert is a fantastic place to try new things, and she’s intersecting two worlds by bringing certain aspects of each into the other. Pop performer and artist go together, not because she wills them to but because they’ve always existed in the same place.

“I always was a drawer,” she says, referencing her beginnings in visual art. There’s no conscious division between personalities.

So in a world where it’s far more acceptable to be an indie band on a major label than it was just a few years ago, is there a division between art and commerce? And does the increased recognition indie bands get through blogs and Internet press signal a golden age for indie rock, or are we witnessing its collapse? She highlighted three people as cultural heroes who had also appealed to both a pop crowd and an art crowd: David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and Bjork. Another example was Outkast, who she carefully declared were not “high art” but certainly well-crafted and artistic. “It’s just excellence being embraced by a wider audience who is willing to pay for it.” As for the status of indie rock, in her eyes the current musical climate has a lot to do with cultural shifts. Indie musicians, typically residing on the fringes rather than the mainstream, became more interested in having their voice heard more when the political climate began to head south: “Things got worse politically, and so it was time to be part of a bigger picture; being on the outside was less appealing.”

That’s not to say we should expect her to join Interpol and the Decemberists on Capitol. Without casting the idea completely aside, she mused on the major label world. “I don’t know if it would even benefit us to be on a major label…I’m on a weird edge where I don’t really understand that some people who do this actually want to be famous. When we first started having 10 people in the room while you played was big potatoes. Now I just feel that if you are making something that you want to be making, and people don’t walk out of the room, then that’s what’s most satisfying.”

The Blow
K Records