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An interview with The Blow

Khaela Maricih started recording music under the moniker The Blow in 2002. It was for fun, mostly, as her friend Calvin Johnson is the owner of K Records and asked her if she’d like to record some songs. After a few small releases, Khaela teamed up with friend Jona Bechdolt for Poor Aim: Love Songs in 2004. Their brand of low-fi pop songs and joint dance performances on stage began to cultivate a niche audience in their home of the Pacific Northwest. But with 2007’s Paper Television, The Blow outgrew the west coast, and singles like “Parentheses” influenced fans to track the album down, and for critics to include it on their Best of the Year lists. A week before the release of Paper Television, though, Jona left The Blow to pursue his own musical venture, Yacht, and the success of his collaboration with Khaela was on her shoulders alone. But while this could have been cause for some to retract and let the songs go it alone without any performance or live tour, Khaela embraced the opportunity, and took her live show across the world to impress fans further with her enigmatic, fun, interesting presence. In the past three years, Khaela has moved from Portland to New York and is readying an album of new songs and is trying them out on select audiences this fall. And she’s coming with even more of a show this time around, as her girlfriend Melissa Dyne is collaborating with her to provide the sound and light work as part of an installation of sorts, while Khaela sings and tells the audience stories, which is exactly what they have come to expect from her.

I met with Khaela before her show in Chicago, and I told her how intimidating it was to attempt to interview and write about her because she was one half of one of my favorite interview pieces I’ve ever read. Shortly after Paper Television was released, Khaela was interviewed by her friend Miranda July for The Believer, and it was in-depth profile/insightful conversation between the two artists that ranged from what The Blow “is” to how Khaela’s mom’s favorite song on the album is sung in French so she doesn’t know it’s about women having sex loudly in the next room over.

Khaela told me that Miranda, a writer/artist/director, had decided she wanted to talk with Khaela and “For The Believer’ would be cool.”

“She was like ‘I want to do an interview with you because you’re doing something really cool right now.’ In that nice way somebody who has a little more pull can do,” Khaela said. She drank hot tea while sitting across from me, looking marginally different from when I had seen her perform at this venue last in 2007. Her blonde hair now reaches past her shoulders and down onto her back, whereas it used to come just below her ears, giving her more of an androgynous look when paired with her stage outfit of a white button-down shirt and white skinny jeans with sneakers. Now, she’s wearing a turtleneck sweater.

Khaela met Miranda while living and working out west. She lived in Olympia for 11 years before relocating to Portland, both communities known for being very queer and full of artists.

“I do hear it a lot, people in New York saying ‘I hear Portland is so nice’ and it’s nice, if nice is what you want. It’s really nice. But if what you want is difference or challenge or an infusion of ideas or kind of like an intellectual conversation or any kind of thought provoking conversation at any level, it’s a lot easier to find in other places than Portland,” Khaela said.

I asked Khaela if she was part of the riot grrl movement, having lived close to the action around the time it all happened, when women were taking to the streets and the microphones to stage a revolution of being heard. I have always been just a little too young and separated from the movement, growing up in the Midwest, so I have always been so envious of those who were part of its initial affect.

“The funniest thing about the riot grrrl movement is in influenced me so much,” Khaela said. “But I was absolutely not a part of it. I wasn’t friends with anybody who was part of it – those girls were tough! And they were pretty intellectual and pretty razor edge and I wasn’t. I was too much of a spaz and I didn’t have enough &mdahs; my convictions weren’t particularly strong. I thought they were kind of harsh.”

“But that said,” she continued, “I never saw Bikini Kill play. How did that happen? I lived in Olympia from 1993 to 2004. Like how did I not see Bikini Kill play once? Not even? It was like you could take it for granted because there were so many amazing female role models, really, in that town that I was sort of like ‘Oh whatever – they can put up the tough front and I can be the tender middle!’ I assumed it was totally acceptable for me to be doing whatever bizarre thing I wanted to do on stage. I had both male and female role models covering that ground, and then I was like ‘Of course women are in bands!'” Khaela noted that living in Olympia at the time, no one was particularly interested in what was going on in the outside world. What was happening there, in the small college town outside of Seattle, was much more interesting than anything in mainstream America.

“There’s something to be said for that safe space,” she said. “To go from that into a place that has lot more conversation and ideas thrown around – I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t 22 and in New York City and be thrown into the canon of music and art history. It can be totally intimidating.”

Khaela and other artists felt free to experiment with what they were doing on stage and with music and art, especially because camera phones didn’t yet exist.

“It was certainly safer too because there was less documentation. Like I can’t even find documentation of stuff I did. And now I think of all the stuff I kind of wish people had been video taping, when you don’t have any kind of pictures of,” she said.

Before going on her own as The Blow, Khaela was a member of The Microphones, an indie band that was a critical darling. It was founded by Phil Elvrum, who Khaela dated briefly.

“He was from my dad’s hometown, and he’s so nice and he’s great!” she said of how she had tried to convince herself it might work between them. “It just didn’t work and so that was publicly out there.”

Khaela is open about being queer and her explicit interest in relationships with women, but said that she hadn’t always been out in her career because she had been known as Phil’s girlfriend at one time. But after she was decidedly queer, she still hadn’t issued any statement on it – it just became inherently part of her persona because it’s who she is.

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On Paper Television, there are songs about boys and songs about girls. But Khaela finds it intriguing that people decide her sexuality based on lyrical content.

“People just see what they want to see in them,” she said. “A lot of people wrote about thte last tour – I don’t usually read reviews, Melissa shields me from them, but there was one when they wrote a recent review apologizing for their hetero-normative reading of the last tour. They thought ‘Oh she must be straight.’ Because of songs about boys. My thing about that is I’m interested in boys in certain times enough to feel really burned if one dogs me. Even if I don’t really want to write a love song about a boy, I can be annoyed with one.”

And The Blow’s new tour could clue you into her queerness more, but could also be cause for confusion if you are an audience member looking to believe everything she says when she has a microphone in hand. Khaela’s performance includes just as much discussion of what she is performing and why as the performance itself. And it’s all under the pretense that she is singing songs as she wrote them for a famous female singer who had a girlfriend in the last couple of years. “But you wouldn’t listen to her music,” Khaela says on stage, never once mentioning the celebrity’s name, but the crowd gets it. The shouting of “Lindsay Lohan!” begins. This is the theme that extends through The Blow’s latest stage performance. New songs like “Make It Up” are said to have been written for this pop star’s new album while she was in a relationship with a woman, but later shelved because of some personal setbacks. And the stories are elaborate: Khaela says “Make it Up,” for instance, was inspired by the celebrity’s coming out to her mother, and her mom replying, “You’re just making it up.” And said celebrity had responded, “It really does feel like we’re making it up – like we’re inventing something new.” And that, as relayed to Khaela, inspired the song.

Did Khaela really write songs for Lindsay Lohan?

“I don’t know what people think,” she said, “but I do know that people really want to believe what you say. And that’s another thing I’m excited about exploring with working in different kinds of context, is performing in an art space or theater space, lights go down and people think ‘OK, someone’s gonna tell me a story.’ And if you work in a music space, even people who are art educated or performers, I’ve seen them want to believe a thing that I’m saying is true just because I’m up there and I’m singing. If I was doing it as a musical, they’d say ‘That’s corny – I know it’s fake,’ but the fact that I’m embodying my own persona, I can’t be my own persona and say something that isn’t true. It’s really exciting to play with that because there’s so much room there.” Not only does Khaela sing these songs, but they come equipped with her taking on the stage presence of someone different – someone much more high femme. When performing as the celebrity, Khaela will tuck in her shirt to make her outfit more fitted and replace her moccasins with six inch studded heels. She’ll carefully remove them afterward, making sure the audience is aware of her much more practical set of slip-ons and preference for looser wear.

When it comes to her appearance, which has altered as I noted earlier from the last time around, Khaela said it’s all part of the performance.

“I think there’s something about presenting as something that men could desire, but that doesn’t mean you can have me. Sometimes its sort of like there are really strong role models for gay women in our culture who are really like so inspiring and amazing and positive like Ellen and Rachel Maddow and even Rosie O’Donnell. But I think when guys look at them, they think ‘Oh well I wouldn’t want to be with her. She’s a lesbian, she’s cool I like her but it’s not like I want to be with her.’ So it’s some kind of assumption that women are lesbians because they couldn’t be with men, like they’re not even an option on the table – so to go ahead and be like, You know what? This is how I look. I kind of enjoy having long hair – I think it’s pretty. And also there’s an interesting way in how you move around in the world and people have these expectations of you. It’s true, you could be attracted to me, but you’re not going to make my heart race. It’s just not going to happen!”

And still this tour is much more lesbian. Besides the songs sung about a celebrity and her new Sapphic relationship, Khaela also sings a song acapella, dedicated to her girlfriend in the sound booth. She sings it right to her:

You had your opinions about my last girlfriend, and you were right. She wasn’t very nice. I’m slow to see what’s good for me, and you are.
Khaela is quick to share how much work she and Melissa have done together for the live show.

“She’s performing the show with me but not on the stage, which is really strange because we do it in art context and music context and we see how people act in those different spaces. She’s not interested in being on the stage,” Khaela said. “In the music world, they don’t really understand it. Other people will be like ‘Nice show’ to me, and don’t look at her because they think she’s the help. Usually the artist doesn’t stand next to their work and say ‘I made this!’ but she’s totally a part of it. It’s cool because we are partners and that we really flow together, and we’re both water sounds and neither of us are particularly grounded and we both like to make things move. When things get really good, she’s just going with me and I’m going with her and she can anticipate what each other is gonna do, she’ll move the light and I’ll move my body over here. That is cool. I like having the kind of relationship where you collaborate and try to make something more. Making a relationship is hard enough, but being able to do both of our artwork together and see what that can make together.”

After the shows have finished, Khaela will head into the studio to lay down the final tracks for her upcoming album, which she said won’t necessarily be released on K Records, as all her previous works were. And considering she has entirely new surroundings in New York City, the final product could be vastly different from what we’ve become used to from her work. But more than anything, The Blow is, at it’s heart, pop music.

“I’ve really been open as a pop product,” Khaela said. “I think pop music is so interesting and vital in a weird way.” And the queering of it is much more interesting and vital, too.

 

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