Several of Maria BC’s songs take place in the hazy aftermath of sleep: “Lights / Polar noise / Break it apart and break down the voice,” the artist sings on, “Now it’s Gone,” a song in which a dream is disappearing: “Pin that song / Wake with a start / Now it’s gone / Now it’s gone.”
Working in and beyond the ambient genre, Maria BC integrates choral texture, lyrical specificity, and folk-tinged intimacy into songs that reach listeners with striking closeness. The effect of that closeness is sometimes, like a lullaby, soothing.
But even as the classically-trained vocalist sings from what sound like ethereal planes, their work feels contextual and tethered to the suffering world in which it is recorded. The title of their second studio album, Spike Field, for example, references an idea that nuclear semiotics researchers conceptualized in the 90s as a visual way to warn people about nuclear waste repositories. Inherent in that name are images of desecration and its aftermath—a splintering set of associations with capitalist violence and the haunting ways people try to communicate in the world that violence renders.
Currently living in Oakland, CA, Maria BC released their second album, Spike Field, in 2023 via Sacred Bones. We spoke with them about genre, apocalypse, love songs, childhood lullabies, and the tragedy of waking up from a dream to go to work in the morning.
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Maia Sauer: I’m curious to hear you speak about your relationship with the word lullaby itself. Is it one you use in your own compositions or seek out as a listener? What do you hear in the contours of that word?
Maria BC: I thought of all the lyrical tracks on my EP Devil’s Rain as lullabies, back when I wrote them in 2020. Lullabies put the listener in a hypnotic state, a relaxed state - it’s safer to communicate to someone in that state. You can be more honest. That’s what I was doing at the time, I think - saying mean things in a gentle way. These days, I’m trying to be more direct with my anger.
Still, the simplicity of a lullaby is something I aspire to. Simplicity and timelessness. The beauty of a lullaby is that it can be sung over and over again, night after night, and it still does its work well. Likewise I want to write songs that age well.
Olivia Q. Pintair: Do you have personal memories of lullabies? Particular sounds or songs or -scapes that stick with you today?
MBC: I don't have memories of my mom singing me to sleep, but she’s told me she used to sing me this song called “Meadowlark.” It's a very beautiful story-song about a woman who decides to leave her husband for a younger man. She recounts a myth about a meadowlark who chooses to remain loyal to her keeper, an old king, rather than escape with the much sexier sun-god. The meadowlark dies.
MS: We’ve been curious about the lullaby as a genre-defying form—one that soothes, but in layered, unexpected, and often haunting ways. What’s your relationship with genre? How does it relate to the kind of emotional connection you craft for and with listeners?
MBC When my partner hears music that they really like, or comes across art that really resonates with them, they'll say, That artist and I grew up eating the same sugar cereals, the same gummy vitamins. Genre has something to do with that. Culture is a diet we share. Some of us grow up consuming, or being fed, the same things. When I write a song, I can try to resist cliches, try to make something unique, but ultimately, I will never transcend my formative diet. It influences me, it informs what genre my work might uphold or fall into. I have to be comforted by the fact that my music will inevitably sound familiar to some people.
The lullaby is a form rather than a genre because it’s timeless. A lullaby is meant to lull someone to sleep - that’s true no matter what century you’re in. Still, lullabies are as reflective of their time as anything else, so one written a hundred years ago will sound different than a contemporary one. A hundred years ago, we did not have Fruit Loops. Today, we have Fruit Loops. Today’s lullaby soothes a very different beast.
OQP: Even as you sing from what sound like ethereal planes, your work feels contextual and intimate with the world in which it is recorded. I’m curious, in a sort of existential sense, what it means to you to be an artist right now. Amid the fires and the floods, in other words, what compels you to keep making music?
MBC: Waste, exploitation and apocalypse show up in my music a lot. These days it’s hard to look at anything and not see that, not see the fires and the floods. Disaster certainly plays a role in my music, but I don't know about the inverse, I don’t know what the role of music is in a world on fire. I think it must have one, but I don't know what it is. I hope that people can feel animated by my music - that’s something I’ve said in the past. But I don’t know.
MS: Dreamscaping seems like a central part of your writing. How would you describe the relationship between music making and dreaming?
MBC: A couple of my songs center around the moment of waking up from a dream. If we're talking about the world that we're in right now—the fires, the floods, desertification, the decay of our world—then I think the moment of waking from a dream can be a really tragic one. When we wake up hastily, when we're called away to work, we’re called away to forget what our bodies and the deepest parts of ourselves are trying to tell us, to awaken us to. So the sadness of that has come up in my music. “Now It's Gone” is one of those.
OQP: You write viscerally, on Spike Field, about the body. Lyric references to bones, trembling hands, animal entrails, and other corporeal invocations add a parasympathetic and earthen texture to your often-spectral sound. Even as you reckon with the frustration and pain involved in being embodied, layers of sonic surrealism seem to compound into something that ultimately feels quite physical. I’d love to hear about how your own experiences navigating somatic life and liminality inform your music.
MBC: I like that music can sometimes make me forget that I’m embodied. That transcendent feeling - that’s so precious. However, I do want to get better at writing viscerally, as you said, integrating discomfort and sickness and injury into my music. I’ve always had frequent abdominal pain and it makes me aware, I guess, of the fact that guts exist in this world. They’re all around us. I wish people would sing about them more.
MS: One throughline it feels possible to chart through the genre of lullaby (despite its genre-defying nature) is a perpetual focus on relationships; a lullaby is maybe most easily defined as a song sung for someone else—a song offered up as a gift. I’m curious about the relationships that are implied or present in your work. Do you ever write songs for specific people?
MBC: The love songs I have are for specific people. I feel so lucky to be able to have [the song-writing thing]. I hope that the people who’ve been on the other side of that get something out of it, because I sure as hell do. And, you know, sometimes a gift is just a vain thing. Just last night [I was] talking to my friend. I was asking, what is your favorite gift that you've given, fully knowing what I was gonna say. It's like, it's all about me. I don't know. But is a lullaby like that? I don't know. I feel like often if you’re singing lullabies to a child, you're doing that out of care and affection, but also because you have to.
MS: I love that distinction about gifts. Because I think it's true—there's more to a gift than an even, equal exchange. It's not that simple. It never is.
MBC: Yeah. I feel a little like I want to maybe rein in some of what I was saying about like, oh, the songs are for me. Maybe it's that [for] the people in my life who I've been closest to and who have inspired me the most, the least that I can do in return is to be as honest as I can about how I feel and turn it into something that they can hear and hopefully feel good about.
OQP: We’ve spoken about the idea of lullabies as entrances into dreamworlds. Certain lyrics in your work conjure similar imagery for me—in “Watcher,” a broken seam is closing, maybe like a door. “Make the mirrors windows,” you write in “Amber,” calling on glass to shatter and become an opening. I often think about the mythological definition of a threshold as a demarcation of transformation, shapeshifting, or change. I’m curious if there are particular symbols of change that you resonate with or gravitate toward in poetry or songwriting?
MBC: That's such a beautiful question. Thank you for pulling that lyric. I'm really proud of that one. I feel like that was a four-word lyric that was a really long time in the making. It’s about dawn. When you’re looking at a window before sunrise, there's no light behind it, so you see your own reflection. But when the sun comes up and the light comes in, you can see out - a mirror becomes a window.
Beyond that… When I'm writing lyrics, certain words come up repeatedly because I'm attached to how they feel in my voice. The word teeth wants to come out a lot. It’s common to dream about your teeth falling out, with that, I think, being an indication of anxiety about change or aging.
MS: How would you describe your relationship with rest?
MBC: I like to lie in the sunshine, especially when it feels extravagant or wrong, which is often. This world rewards those who push themselves as hard as they can, optimize their bodies and eschew rest. I tried to draw attention to that, and to mourn that, in this song on Spike Field called “Haruspex.” The chorus goes, “Harder, everyone wants their hard-earned break / Hunger, everyone wants their future saved.” The people want rest! but rest is forbidden.
OQP: If you were to make a mixtape of lullabies, what songs would it include?
MBC:
"Lithuanian Lullaby," by Veronika Povilioniene
"Babydoll," by Cat Power
"Don't Dwell," by Tracy Chapman