Meet Marian Hill Before They Wow at Osheaga
Marian Hill
Marian Hill is a band you may never have met before, but those lucky enough to catch them at Osheaga are in for a treat. This American duo of Samantha Gogol and Jeremy Lloyd mixes together the very satisfying R&B, jazz, and electronic sounds to create a sultry but contemporary sound. In order to let you meet them before Osheaga, I talked to Gogol and Lloyd.
The band has spent its summer performing at different festivals. Gogol explains, “It’s really cool because each festival has its own unique world and vibe. It’s been fun and been experiencing how different and exciting they all are. We’re traveling around, getting to run into other artists more, talk to them, catch shows. When you’re on tour, there’s only time for your tour. Instead, you’re hanging out and going on weekend trips to different cities and hearing cool bands, seeing cool fan environments.”
Lloyd says that Osheaga in particular has a lot of hype among artists for being a great place to perform. However, this isn’t their first trip to Montreal. They played at Bar de Bleury on one of their mini tours. The change in venue size is certainly going to be a pleasant surprise for them.
I asked if they had any funny stories about their time on tour. Lloyd recounts how at the Electric Forest Festival in Michigan, when they played their whole album (Act One), they had to scramble to get a new audio interface working. Fortunately the good old pull out the plug and plug it back in trick worked. As for Gogol, she talks about how she got caught up in the light installations at Electric Forest while hanging out with fellow artist Gallant. They got lost. He lost his wallet. “A cool experience turned into a Forest from Hell. It was 1:30 a.m. and I had the keys to the van and everyone was waiting for us.”
Nonetheless, the experience of meeting fans and attracting new ones who have never heard of the band is something they both say is one of the great experiences of going to festivals.
Something to watch out for are their visuals and upcoming music videos. Lloyd says that some of the information is confidential, but he mentions that Harvey Pearson did “awesome visuals for Down and for I Know Why. I love the way he rhythmically manipulates the image. He takes the cover art and makes the dance.” He further explains that the visuals when they perform are by Zach Bell, their creative director who does all of our overseas artwork. “They’re cool, slo-mo images of bodies that are very in our color palette and style of the covers. He nailed it. Zach pulled that off in a day.”
To this point, Lloyd has a story that getting the images in time for a performance was rather hairy as the file was an 11 GB download. “We had to go on in two hours and the wifi was too slow. We went to a hotel where our manager was at, but it was still too slow.” The solution came when he found out the office of the hotel had an Ethernet connection. The download happened in a half hour, just in time.
Hopefully there will be no technically glitches at Osheaga, and everyone will have a chance to hear this hot duo perform.
Catch Marian Hill at Osheaga on Friday July 29 at Scene des Arbes Sirius XM at 7:15 PM. For more information on Osheaga, click HERE.
