Marrow’s Gold Standard
Marrow's Macie Stewart gets her inspiration from St. Vincent
Macie Stewart has only met Grammy-winning indie-pop sensation St. Vincent once.
“It was at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia in 2011,” she says, noting that her nerves got the best of her. “It was more like ‘Hi!’ and then I ran away really fast.” Stewart met her idol while performing as part of the band Kids These Days.
Two years ago, Stewart and two other members of that unwieldy, seven-piece band of Chicago teenagers broke off and created their own rock-oriented group. “Band names are probably my least favorite task, because it’s just really hard to find something that represents you,” Stewart says. But she and her band mates found inspiration in the St. Vincent song, “Marrow.” “In addition to being the name of one of my favorite St. Vincent songs,” she says, “I liked the imagery it evokes.”
It helps that music is in Stewart’s bones. She was raised by a musician mother and music-loving father, who weaned her on piano at age three and violin at age five. By the time she was in high school, Stewart was already writing her own songs, and her passion for music had taken her as far as Ireland, playing fiddle with a Chicago-based touring group.
Stewart was planning to go to college to study classical piano, until pursuit of her own music took over. Not that the 22-year-old has let herself get rusty. “I still practice it at home all the time,” she says.
These days, her biggest commitment is Marrow and touring in support of its strong debut set, The Gold Standard, an eclectic mix of folk, progressive-rock and punk-pop. You can hear St. Vincent’s influence on several songs on the new album, nowhere more so than on the short, hard-charging anthem “Paulson.” When asked what the song is about, Stewart cites a totally unrelated, unexpected source: Fight Club.
“I had just read the book and I thought it’d be fun to write a song about that,” she says, adding with a sly laugh, almost if she had broken the first rule of her own Fight Club: “I don’t really tell many people that.” — Doug Rule
Marrow performs Sunday, Nov. f8, at 8:30 p.m., at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. Tickets are $10. Call 202-483-5000 or visit dcnine.com.
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