Country Girl Wants You to Meditate

When I interviewed Nasa Hadizadeh of Alt Citizen for this column last month, one commenter wrote that they "get the feeling hellgate just write articles related to their friends and what they're interested sometimes." 

I don't actually know Hadizadeh personally—but at Hell Gate, we take reader feedback very seriously. That's why I decided that this time I would actually write an article "related to" my friend. Meet Maurice Marion, who performs as the experimental pop act country girl and has an EP called "patience" coming out next week on FADER label. 

I've known Marion for about a year or so, and we've played music together a couple of times. When we got on the phone, Marion pre-empted my question about the name country girl: "Everyone always asks me about the name, which I don't really have a good answer for. It just was a vibe thing. And I think it's funny, because I'm a real city boy."

Marion grew up between Westchester and the Upper West Side. The son of an opera singer, he said he only listened  to "Brahms and Beethoven" until he was 16, in 2011. He attended the Julliard pre-college program for flute and composition until, that year, he "practiced so much that I injured myself really badly. I couldn't play the flute for like, a year." 

It was at that moment, when Marion said he was also beginning to listen to contemporary music for the first time, that his mom advised him to go to college rather than conservatory. He went to Columbia, and took pop production classes in the same room that Vampire Weekend made their first record. He and his friends started a music magazine, an event-production organization, and a recording studio.

Marion also joined bands, including a noise band where he'd scream and pop a balloon full of fake blood in his face—college!

Afterwards, he toured with and played with the indie pop band Purr, whose producer Jonathan Rado turned him on to the sound of recording to tape. In 2020, Marion started country girl, where he creates pop with a psychedelic sheen. And these days, instead of screaming, he whispers, the trademark of the country girl sound.

Whispering "was a choice, but it also kind of found its way naturally," Marion said. "If I'm really close to the mic and it's like I'm whispering in your ear, that's actually the type of music that I'm hearing in my head when I imagine the music I want to make." 

"It's harder to do live, I will say," he said. I said he should ask the singer of YHWH Nailgun, the other big whisper-centric band in town these days, for advice, and he said that they actually have discussed their process for coming up with their vocal sounds (and the bassist in that band played on country girl's first record, which came out last year).

"Patience," he told me, features instrumental performances from Sam Glick, who plays in the band Test Subjects, as well as the breakbeat drummer Russell Holtzman. On his debut, Marion channeled the sound of golden hour, but on "patience," he wanted to capture the sound of biking around the city at night.

I asked Marion where he's biking to in the next couple of weeks.