MISSOULA - Every Grammy nominee started somewhere — with a dream and with the talent to back it up.
Over the years, we’ve covered a lot of local performers because Missoula is, after all, a town filled with talented musicians. But our favorite has to be a young woman named Maris. We first met her when she was just 16 years old and at the time, had the number one EP at Rockin’ Rudy’s. And in the time since that first interview, her star has continued to rise.
Singer and songwriter Maris dropped her brand-new song called False Idol on Friday. She wrote and co-produced the music video too. It’s whimsical, energetic and darn good, just like her song Heavenly Bodies that dropped earlier, and it all started here.
Jill Valley met a then 16-year-old Maris seven years ago. She’s since had brushes with fame with Post Modern Jukebox, American Idol, A viral video cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, and an international tour. We also caught up with her when she was 18 and on her way to New York City. "Coming from Montana I am very aware I’m about to hit the biggest learning curve of my life,” Maris said at the time.
Now at 23, she’s in Los Angeles working with her team.
“They’ve been an incredible resource really teaching me how pop works. The pop music industry is so crazy, you know, coming from Montana. The music industry was not really a tangible thing to me,” Maris explained. It was very... you walk into a record label, you sign a deal, and become a megastar when in reality a record label is a bank, and they loan you the money and the resources to make what you make.”
Maris has always been talented — that is undeniable. But listening to her latest work, it's clear she is finding a stronger voice.
“When you start working with people of higher caliber, you cannot just send them anything and expect them to say ‘yes, we're going to put this out’,” Maris said. “I’ve probably written more than a hundred songs in the past year and a half, two years, just trying to figure out what I actually want to say and what am I going to look back on in ten years and say ‘yes, that’s a really good song like what is undeniable’.”
Things slowed down for Maris during COVID-19. She came home to Missoula but still wrote songs and worked with musicians over zoom. Heavily Bodies was inspired by a space documentary she watched on YouTube and her life experiences are woven into the truth of her lyrics.
“The short-term goal right now is I want to keep releasing singles, after this EP. I want to get this EP out first because it’s a really beautiful collection of songs,” Maris told MTN News. “I’m so proud. I really feel like it establishes a good groundwork work and body of work of this is who I am, this is what I do, and this is my voice.”
As a child, she often leaned on music as a friend — and the pictures in her mind as she listened — have helped shape her music videos.
“Someday, I like the idea of working with a director and having them tell me what do to. But at this stage, I've learned that if I don’t do it, it won’t be done the way that way I want it to be. And maybe I’m a little bit of a control freak,” Maris laughed.
Watch Jill Valley's full interview with Maris below.
We asked Maris about the Grammy awards back when she was 16, “it'd be frigging sweet to be recognized like that, but I think I'd be perfectly content just to be able to live off my music.”
Her viewpoint hasn’t changed that much since that interview.
“I think it’s a slippery slope to base your happiness on the validation of other people, especially a committee that might not resonate with what you do. But that doesn’t mean anything you’re doing is any less than what anybody else is doing. It’s about making stuff that you’re proud of. That’s my goal, to make an album that is completely undeniably the best I can possibly do,” Maris concluded.
Maris is embarking on a tour in the US and Canada in early spring where she will be opening for Anna of the North.
