Mariam The Believer: “I needed to explore another part of myself”

If you’re familiar with Swedish guitar-and-drums duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums, then you’ll already be aware that singer and guitarist Mariam Wallentin has quite the voice. Smoky, jazzy and slightly slurred, in that gorgeous accent of hers that comes from having Swedish/Iranian parents, it always perfectly offset the raw and wild, stripped-down sounds she made with husband/drummer Andreas Weliin.

Although no doubt devoted to that band, Wallentin was left in need of a break last year following constant recording and touring with Wildbirds since they formed back in 2006. But rather than go off and seek peace and quiet, she decided the best thing to do was to launch a solo project – and so Mariam The Believer was born. Altogether more soulful and expansive than her work in Wildbirds, debut album Blood Donation combines Wallentin’s love of soul music, organ sounds, electronics and experimental jazz to incredible effect. Songs roll out past five, six, seven minutes allowing Wallentin to play around with the music and truly let her voice soar. For a record borne out of looking inwards, it’s filled with hope, belief and digging around for something more. Best Fit was delighted to catch up with Mariam at her home in Stockholm recently to talk about her new project, and what it’s like to be a serial killer in a modern opera…

So, what led Mariam to breaking away from Wildbirds & Peacedrums and taking on a solo record? “Well, I’d had it in the back of my mind for a couple of years actually,” she reveals. “I’d been touring so much with Wildbirds & Peacedrums and last summer we’d went on a really huge collaboration tour – Congotronics Vs Rockers – and it was just a peak of a long period of travelling…and I came back home and felt drained.” It seems Wallentin needed a break from people in general. She explains: “It was time to start over again – I really felt that! It was a wonderful experience but there were too many people and too many egos, and I was quite tired of that whole thing. I needed to look inward, a little bit, again and start a new creative process.”

Rather than taking any kind of complete break from music, Wallentin just kept writing: “So, this all finally fell into place; during the summer I had been writing some ‘texts’ sporadically, and quite soon after I came home I managed to write the whole album in less than two weeks! I’m often doing things quite intensely!” I ask if she might have been better off taking time away from music, as the writing of an album will inevitably lead to tours, press, interviews…“I think I just needed to, how do you say, explore another part of myself?” explain Mariam. “It wasn’t a dramatic thing; personally I think it suits me to have different things going on parallel that stimulate me so I don’t get too stuck in what I do, and gives me freedom.” Wallentin plays in W&P with her husband, drummer Andreas. I ask how he felt about Mariam going off and doing something on her own. “He was really supportive; because we decided to take a break…we’d been touring this last album quite a lot, and we’d never had a break! So we thought it’d be interesting to try that, to have a break from Wildbirds and see where we stand, after a while. He’s been working with other projects parallel to me doing the solo thing now.”

Two songs which really stand out on Blood Donation are “The String of Everything” and the epic “Invisible Giving“. These two, especially the latter, seem to encapsulate what Wallentin was aiming for with Mariam The Believer, so I ask, hoping that she’ll mention these two songs, if there was a particular track or writing experience that sparked the whole project: “Actually, I think it was ‘Invisible Giving’,” she admits. “That’s the first song I wrote for the album. For me, it’s quite interesting as it’s the longest song! Even if it sounds like some kind of collage, it actually came out that way and I couldn’t change it.” “Invisible Giving” is indicative of the more expansive sound on Blood Donation and it seems the track was always destined for Marian’s solo project once she realised it wouldn’t work as a Wildbirds track. She takes up the story: “I tried to play it with Andreas and make maybe two or three songs out of it, but it just didn’t work and it was then I realised ‘okay, this is my turning point!’” And has it been a freeing experience, or even fun to be out there on her own? “Yes, it has!” exclaims Marian. “Wildbirds is so much about taking off layers and finding the rawness in the song. The Believer has been more about finding some kind of warmth – I was quite into that. I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to have warm keys or organ of some sort.“

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I say the album does have a soulful vibe, but also the freedom of a jazz record, or experimental electronica, so what was behind that sound? “I was influenced by Alice Coltrane,” says Mariam, “and that sort of free, spiritual and warm music – I really wanted to have that! I was also trying to find the balance between cold, chilly guitar and I had a couple of lanes to work with. I guess it comes down to rawness anyway and how to deliver energy in the song when I’m recording.” Was the warmth and soul something Mariam was aiming for, or was that something that appeared during the recording? “I realised after I made the record that it is actually quite soulful,” begins Wallentin, “and I guess I’ve been quite like that all the time but I could never hear it in myself…but now I’m ‘yeah, I’m bluesy, I’m soulful!’. But I didn’t listen to that much music during the recording; normally I don’t think I do that so much, I’m more making mood boards with pictures and colours, and that kind of thing. I think quite a lot in images when I’m writing a song…if it’s cold, if it’s warm, light, dark…that’s the starting point. Alice Coltrane was one thing, and Mark Hollis too”.

As themes go, it’s pretty clear the act of giving, and how one defines themselves through interacting with others (as well as having that vital time alone) dominates the songs on Blood Donation. I ask Mariam if it’s fair to say that giving is the central theme on the album, and she agrees: “Yes, I think so. Blood Donation is of course about the physical giving but I thought of that as being symbolic. Like singing – you take something from inside of your body and you give it to the outside.” It turns out, though, that this approach to writing is something of a new thing for Wallentin: “Giving was a central theme; I actually thought in themes on this album, and that’s the first time I’ve done that. I thought about questions quite a lot – if you read the lyrics on a lot of songs there are questions that have answers, which I thought was quite interesting. It’s a way of opening up more: saying that I don’t need to deliver all the time, I don’t have all the answers, we don’t know everything. That kind of philosophy went around my head.”

On “Invisible Giving”, Mariam sings “make a hole, make a hole”, and in the video for the song we also see her literally digging for those answers she just mentioned. So, was this another theme on the record? “Holes were another theme, yes;” she reveals. “That actually sounds a bit hippy-dippy but images can really trigger me, and it works for me to think in more abstract terms sometimes and find your own universe in it. I try to make pop songs that have lyrics which are stories, you know ‘I went to one place and then blahblahblahblahblah and then ended up there’ but to me that doesn’t work; I need to have another point of view.” So we’re talking about rising up out of a hole, or maybe seeing the scene from another angle, like underneath? “Yeah, exactly. Maybe you’re in the same room as where the story takes place but you see it from another angle – from above, or underneath. That’s what’s interesting with music and lyrics; it isn’t just text, it’s part of something else that’s floating, or abstract…and it’s better to work like that.”

There’s also a song, “Dead Meat” that’s very interesting, while we’re on the topic of themes. As a clarinet plays over a rather laid back groove, Wallentin sings, graphically, “so cut it out with a butcher’s knife” and then “the impact of bleeding in nest made out of barbed wire fence”; it turns out that this is a song set during a heated summer barbecue gathering, and reflects Wallentin’s own vegetarianism. “I try to be vegan as much as I can,” she admits. “I’m not into genres or titles but I try to stay away from eating animal as much as I can. I love the taste of meat, but I think you have to sacrifice something for the sake of the earth. It’s funny that you mention that song, because someone sent me a review last week and it was like ‘can someone please tell me what this means?’ It’s pretty obvious. I kind of had this picture when I wrote the song…people were having a barbecue, and it was so warm…it was just kind of how we treat the planet, in bigger terms.”

A couple of days before we spoke, Wallentin had just played her first London show as Mariam The Believer, and she tells me how it went: “The venue was beautiful and the audience was really nice; it went great, but it was a special show for me. The night before I had just finished the last show of a modern opera, so I’d been in London for one-and-a-half weeks.” An opera? “Yes, it’s based on The Wasp Factory, and I actually played a seventeen-year-old serial killer called Frank! It was the first time I’d been anyone else on stage, I’m quite used to being myself! It was a great experience, but I did the last show of that the day before…so it was a bit weird being Mariam again after three weeks of playing a serial killer. But I needed it, just to go back to ‘who am I, what am I doing here?” So was it hard to get out of being this serial killer character? “Oh no, I’m not an actor. It was just a week of big contrasts. One day I’m a serial killer, the next I’m Mariam The Believer, and the next I’m back in Sweden doing a free jazz show!”

Wallentin goes on to reveal that there will be more shows as Mariam The Believer, and that she and Andreas are just two weeks away from finishing the next Wildbirds & Peacedrums album. So, to wrap things up, I have to ask about the name, Mariam The Believer…is it all to do with hope? “Yes,” confirms Wallentin. “It’s about believing in something. When you create, you sometime gain from your darker places, and I find myself doing that. But I have a lot of hopes inside of me – so I’m fascinated by the darkness, but I still want to fight it. I don’t want to surrender to the darkness, because then it becomes flat, creatively. There’s a saying that hope is the last to die…otherwise we’d have nothing left!”

Blood Donation is out now via Moshi Moshi.