It must have been in a summer month of my youth, in the midst of a family vacation in the blue and gray Ford minivan, but the night that I’m trying to remember – well, Mariee Sioux is the one responsible for any of this – got cold as a shoulder when the sun had set. There’s a stretch of Minnesota, north of anywhere that anything happens, where the highways and byways are made from the plentiful red stone that is quarried nearby. We’d be there, staying in a house that smelled like dirt and fresh milk, with an old pool table at the top of some creaky stairs. It was a bachelor’s pad on a dairy farm, in a city where our favorite restaurant had a statue of an enormous Indian out front and personal jukeboxes at every table. The night that Sioux makes me think about with her latest album Faces in the Rocks is one involving a production of the life story of Hiawatha, a man credited as the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, entitled “The Song of Hiawatha.” There is a climactic scene in the play – staged entirely outdoors and unwisely at a distance and on the opposite side of a large lake from where the audience does its viewing – where Hiawatha, or perhaps it was a follower as the details aren’t what they used to be, leaps naked from a very tall cliff into what I imagined at the time to be chilly as hell waters. That plunge and the night completely tinged with this orated peacemaking attempt and dramatic portrayal of a man seeking for self-betterment. That lake and that man breaking the water, and the exhilarating forward progress into that black liquid are where Sioux comes from with her touching and absolutely freaky thoughts — set to a stark acoustic guitar. It’s evocative in such a way that can remind one of Bob Dylan and Ralph Steadman, the personal illustrator for Hunter S. Thompson. She flings everything at her own lax pace, but there are erratic ink spots and lyrical riddles that both of the noted men were/are known for. She sings, “Buried in teeth/Can’t tell if I’ve got rivers or veins/Running under my skin/Flowing out over the plains/There’s trapped antennae/All tangled up with these brains/And the spin of cocoons whispers your names,” and immediately you’re silent outside, but the inside is a pandemonium of questions and a whole lot of wind knocked out of it. You come for the soft and gorgeous looks and delicate guitar, but you stay for the mind-enhancing confusion, never-left-nature behind mentality and the glorious beauty of saying some bizarre things.

Mariee Sioux sheds a light on what she’s been inspired by this week (the following is unedited because it’s as she wrote it and more exciting that way):
Lately I’ve just been: Beading at the dinner table, Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, Armistice Day by Paul Simon, Jackson Brown’s album Saturate Before Using, Greatful Dead’s American Beauty Watering our ferns, Bouquets, Cosomos, Dahlias, same old stirfry !, tomatoes, VINEGAR ON EVERYTHING!!! herb bundles, Cannery Row by Steinbeck, hurting wheat
belly
!!!!!!

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