Maria BC on Audiobooks, I Saw the TV Glow, and Nostalgia's Narcissism

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Let's get into it: Rian Bobbitt-Chertock's got a great new album out as Maria BC this week, Marathon. The Oakland-based musician's approach to songwriting keeps shifting in fascinating ways, and for someone whose music I thought I had all figured out, there were some real-deal surprises on this record that shocked the senses. I hopped on the phone with Rian earlier this month to chat through their latest achievement as well as their increasingly impressive career so far, and it was a great conversation—check it out:

Talk to me a little bit about how this record came together.
It was more gradual and piecemeal over a couple of years. I decided to devote that time to refine the songs rather than the production and arrangement, which is different than how I've done it previously. It came out with a pretty different feel than the last couple of records.

Yeah, I do hear some new wrinkles as far as what you're doing sonically.
It's a different palette. It feels more like a traditional singer-songwriter record. I was thinking about the album as a whole being consistent thematically, but it doesn't feel as much as one long sentence, which is how I felt about Spike Field. With this one, I wrote a bunch of songs and collected and sequenced the ones I thought was the strongest.

"Channels" stood out to me right away. Talk to me a little bit about the textures on that track.
There's a thread, sonically, throughout the record of these strange, varied percussive sounds, which came from my friend Kathryn. She showed me the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in Oakland, where there's this big tube on the side of a hill that makes this reverb noise. We squatted in front of it and threw a bunch of rocks inside of it and recorded samples for a while. That ended up being used pretty often on the album, which was an exciting discovery.

"Marathon" has a very specific perspective, lyrically. Walk me through that.
Lyrically, it's drawing from memories that I have of the street that I grew up on as a kid. There was a Marathon gas station at the end of it, and when I'd see the glowing "M" in the sky from the back of my mom's car, I knew we were about to be back home. I'm trying to draw attention to—or call into question—what it means to feel nostalgia for a symbol that's ultimately quite pernicious. Moreover, the title fits well for the record because of all these other meanings and connotations that it brings to mind, just beyond the gas station.

With nostalgia, it's as easy to be entranced by it as it is to be repulsed by it. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Writing songs for this project, an idea that comes up for me over and over again—regardless of whether I'm trying to pursue it or not—is the uncanniness of how the past insists itself and interrupts the present. Memory as a force beyond our control. Nostalgia—which I think of as the act of remembering the past with desire and longing—can be both comforting and distressing, it’s true. I wouldn’t say that my music longs for the past exactly, but I am interested in thinking about memory the way some people think about dreams—that is, by assuming that they carry latent meaning, that they’re trying to tell us something important about ourselves and our world.

As far as your records are concerned, it feels like you emerged a few years before ambient pop became one of the dominant strains in indie. It used to be that we'd get one or two artists that do what you do every so often; now, it seems like we have a lot of them.
It's hard for me to say, because I always think I'm in less of a cultural bubble that I am. But in the bubble that I'm in, it has felt like over the five years or so, there's  been a kind of congealing over what kinds of like guitar music people are nostalgic for, and that's been interesting—and certainly exciting for me, because it's the very stuff that I've felt interested in. There's a certain mood that people my age—and a bit younger—are interested in exploring ,that people a bit older than me were not as interested in. I can't really say where that might come from, but I'm grateful for it. It does seem like my peers are interested in tapping into darkness in a way that the kinds of records that were popular in a similar strain like 10 years ago just weren't.

Talk to me about collaborating with Rachika Nayar. When I heard you on her music, I was like, "This makes so much sense to me."
Yeah, that was so beautiful that I got to do that. She sent me the instrumental for it, and I stayed up really late listening to it over and over. It's a special thing to get to collaborate with someone, and it's something that exists that's hard to describe in language. I'm proud of that song.

I also really loved your contribution to the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, it's honestly one of my favorite songs of yours.
I'm so honored to have been asked to have been a part of it. I say, "I wrote it for the movie," but actually, it went like this: Jane asked me to write the song and sent over the script; I read the script, and I ended up sending them a demo of a song that I'd just finished writing maybe a week before they’d reached out, because I felt like there were these moments in the lyrics that aligned so well with moments in the film, like Owen sitting by the campfire, Maddy’s disappearance, and wires and cables as a visual motif. So it ended up being a happy accident—or maybe Jane and I were tapped into some similar thing in the collective unconscious.

Talk to me about the financial realities of being an artist.
Well, I'm calling you on the drive home from my work in a shipping warehouse. I put vinyl and t-shirts into packages and send them to people. That's how I make ends meet. I was lucky enough to be able to take some time off to write this record, though. In general, the “financial realities” are touch-and-go. That’s the price of unalienated work.

Do you listen to music while you work?
I listen to music, and I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I've become more well-read than I've been in my entire life. I'm really grateful for that.

Listened to any good books lately?
When you called, there were actually tears running down my face because I was just listening to the end of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It's amazing. It's about queers, Communists, disabled people, Black radicals, all these struggling people in the South in the 1930s, all drawn together in their lonesomeness and desperation.