Marianne Keuleman (also known as Oddeline) is a rising Canadian jazz-folk singer-songwriter based in Ottawa. Although relatively early in her music career, some of her notable accomplishments include receiving praise for her songwriting abilities from mainstream media, collaborating with Sofar Sounds to organize two concert series, and, most recently, earning an opening slot for Bahamas at Ottawa Bluesfest. Recently, I had a chance to chat with her about her career and outlook.
Ken: You recently performed at Ottawa Bluesfest as the opening slot for Bahamas. How would you describe that experience?
Marianne: It was amazing. I loved it. The whole day was really awesome. The team at Bluesfest, the hospitality people, the stage crew, and the sound techs—everyone was so nice to us. They treated us really well. That aspect of it was really great, especially when you’re used to playing smaller gigs, not that people at small venues are not nice. It’s just that we had catering, a trailer, and experiences we don’t usually get to have at smaller shows. Then, being on the river stage, where I’ve seen a lot of really great performances in the past, and looking out and seeing so many people. I’ve definitely never played to that many people before. Getting to open for Bahamas was really cool. It was everything. It was awesome. The sun was setting over the river as I was playing. It was perfect. I’m happy that we got to do that.
Ken: Do you have any pre-show rituals? Do you have any must-bring items for your shows?
Marianne: I guess I do. I just don’t really think of it as a ritual, necessarily. But I try to use my voice. I studied voice in university and so I’ve learned to take care of my voice. I try to eat really well the day of and the day before, not drink before the show, drink lots of water, and try to get some exercise—all that kind of stuff. I take a good chunk of time to do my makeup and my hair, because that’s just really nice, focused time. That’s almost meditative, to be honest. It’s really a nice part of my routine before a show. Then I just really need some quiet time before I play. I tend to get a little bit overwhelmed, like socially at shows. I struggled a lot with that. If I’m at a smaller venue, I’ll try to just sit with my friends or whoever’s there with me and not really be out in the crowd too much beforehand. Sometimes it’s hard at a bar cause you’re just sitting with everyone, and there are people there that I want to see who came out to see me and hang out. Something like Bluesfest was a lot easier because I had a trailer. I just sat in my trailer and had really nice, quiet time. I did some warm-ups and went over the set list. I don’t feel like I have something that I really think of as a ritual, but a nice routine in which my body is feeling okay, my voice is sitting in an alright place, and that I’m not too anxious or drained before I get on stage. I try to do the socializing, thank-yous, drinking, and anything like that after the show because that’s what I find works best for me and lets me play and sing as well as I can at whatever state I’m at that day.
Ken: Fans of yours know that you put a lot of thought into your songs, especially in the stories that you share behind them. What does your songwriting process look like?
Marianne: I just kind of have a notebook that I carry around with me everywhere. Throughout life, if I am going through something or having thoughts, as we do, I’ll just be jotting stuff down pretty regularly. Sometimes, it’s a single thought. Sometimes, it’s more of a little poem, just very stream of consciousness. I’m not trying to make it sound good. I kind of collect those over time. Then, sometimes, I have the feeling that I have to get a song out of me. When I get that feeling, I like to sit down and try to write a song or figure out what exactly is going on. So, then, I flip through the notebook. Sometimes, I just start right in that moment with whatever I’m feeling. A lot of the time, it is flipping through the notebook and finding something that I’ve written before that speaks to me in some way. Then that’s when I take out the guitar and just pick words. I slide my fingers around random shapes sometimes. I’m not always playing traditional chords. Then, I just sing over it. It kind of all happens at the same time. I don’t do lyrics first and then melody after or chords first, then melody. It kind of all just comes out as one, which I think is part of why, sometimes, I’ll have weird things in my songs that I don’t really do on purpose. Because I’m writing the melody at the same time as the chords and stuff, it just sort of all happens in a way. After that, depending on the song, I find a lot of the time I can only write like a verse in a chorus and then I kind of have to come back to it later. Sometimes, it all happens at once. Once it’s done, I play it a lot to myself and make demos. My songs usually sit for, honestly, sometimes years before I do anything with them. A lot of the time, I just put them aside and then a few months later or a couple years later, I’ll revisit it and be like, “Is this still good?” That’s when I start to actually produce it or, sometimes, even play it live. It takes that long for me to actually share it.
Ken: What’s the fastest and longest time you've spent working on your songs?
Marianne: For the fastest, ‘Mercury Ascendant.’ It was really quick; it was just one sitting. The only thing that took a little bit longer with ‘Mercury’ was the picking pattern. When I wrote that, I was very much at the beginning of learning to fingerpick. The original part was a little bit less intricate than it ended up being. But the core of the song—the chords, kind of idea of what I wanted the fingerpicking to be (even though I wasn’t able to play it yet), melody, words, and everything—I wrote all in one sitting. It was probably under an hour and, bam, it was done. But I have a song that I’m working on now that's in the very early stages of production. I play it live called ‘Waiting.’ I wrote the first verse. It’s not really a chorus; it’s more like an A section then a B section. That one was a very emotionally fraught song to write. I just put it away. I didn't want to think about it anymore. Then, a solid year later, or maybe even more than a year later, I was flipping through the notebook or found a demo. I can’t remember. I was either reading the lyrics or listening to the first demo that I did and I was like, “Oh God, this is so raw.” I really liked what I’d written, and it really made me feel things about the situation. So, the second half of that song is me reflecting a year or between a year and two years after the situation that it’s about, which I think is part of why I feel that song has a really interesting kind of narrative arc to it. I think that’s probably why it really was over a long period of time. My thoughts about the situation and my feelings about it changed throughout the time I was writing the song, cause the first part is kind of in the moment and then the second half of it is reflecting after a longer period of time.
Ken: What artists are you currently listening to?
Marianne: Like everyone else, I have been spinning that new Charli XCX album a lot, which has been super fun. I really enjoy Brat. I also have been listening to the recent Lana Del Rey album, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? Those are kind of the main two the past couple weeks. I’ve been revisiting Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell. That’s kind of an all-time favourite of mine. There’s always some older folk stuff in there too; I’ve been very into Rodriguez this year. But, right now, in the moment, it’s really Charli and Lana that I’ve been mainly listening to.
Ken: You mentioned some contemporary names, but you have often been influenced by artists such as Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention. In terms of contemporary artists, are there any contemporary artists that have influenced your music?
Marianne: Definitely. I’ve always listened to a really big mix. I don’t really think about where music is from. I grew up listening to music from all those years. When I was little, probably 10 or something, my dad had downloaded the Billboard Hot 100s from 1946 to 2005. I listened to the whole thing from the forties until the present. I think that I’m a bit time-blind with music. It’s not definitely only old music. Like with Lana Del Rey’s later albums, I’m not as into her older stuff as the Norman Fucking Rockwell! album. I find I’m really just drawn to the sounds in her music—the melodies, production, stringwriting, and all that stuff. Also, one of my all-time favourite bands is Half Moon Run, who are based in Montreal. Their lead singer is actually from Ottawa. I’ve seen them a lot of times and I’ll be seeing them in the fall at City Folk Festival. They’re not only musically inspiring, but I discovered them when I was a teenager and I’ve been through all their albums that they’ve put out. They’ve been around a decently long time now. The fact that their lead singer was from Ottawa and they aren’t a massive band, I always found that really inspiring, cause I never wanted to be super successful like that. They’re very successful, but they’re not world-famous or something like that. I just want to make music and be able to play shows. I really like finding modern artists that I can relate to just because they’re a little bit more in the music industry that I’m working in versus someone like Bob Dylan, who was living in a different world than what we live in. Another modern artist that has influenced me is Hozier. I love Hozier. I have always loved Hozier. The folk-rock stuff like Half Moon Run and Hozier is still definitely there in my music, I think.
Ken: Those are some great names.
Marianne: I even found this in marketing ‘Mercury Ascendant’ versus marketing my newest single, ‘Little Bull.’ It’s so much easier to market something if you make it this really narrow, specific thing like, “This was influenced by 1960s jazz-folk music.” In reality, nothing’s ever that simple. I listen to a million things, read a bunch of stuff, and I’m thinking about all these different things. But there are so many layers that make it really difficult to communicate that to people. So, it’s a lot easier to kind of simplify it. But, in reality, I’m a person with lots of things going on in my brain that aren’t all 1960s folk music.
Ken: There seems to be a clear divergence from your past sound, such as the incorporation of string sections and the themes of womanhood in the recent singles that you mentioned. How did this change come about? Will you continue with this direction?
Marianne: I would say that dealing with gender in music is all through my first EP as well. I feel I didn’t talk about it as much cause no one was really paying attention to me, so I didn’t really have a platform to say anything. It’s been there the whole time I’ve been writing. I’m a young woman in the world. I’m going to write about that to a certain extent. That’s always interested me, and just being in a male-dominated industry like music, which is something that’s on my mind a lot more than I would honestly like it to be. But here we are. For the strings and that kind of thing, yes. That’s something I always wanted to do, but I didn’t have the space, knowledge, or confidence to record strings because I engineer my own music. I started working in the past couple years at Digital Arts Resource Centre, which is a member-based studio space in downtown Ottawa. So, working in that space is a much more professional space than being in my parents’ basement, where I used to record. Also, I’ve just had a lot more experience and I’ve gotten more confident. I also made friends with Ethan Mitchell, who is an Ottawa-based musician that you know, who is in a duo called Nyx and Lightsmith with his partner, Maddy O’Regan. They’re really good friends of mine and we’ve collaborated a tonne. I just finished engineering an EP for them, and they played strings on ‘Little Bull'—Ethan wrote the string arrangement. In having them to work with and people that I really enjoy working with, both as people in addition to as collaborators, hell yeah, I’m going to keep doing strings! It’s such a beautiful sound to me and it runs through a lot of music that I like. Another thing that is definitely part of my music DNA, although I don’t listen to it as much now, is old vocal jazz. Also, I listen to pop music of the 1960s that was very string heavy, like Dusty Springfield, Engelbert Humperdinck, and people like that. For a few years now, I’ve been super into Scott Walker, who’s a little bit of a lesser-known 1960s British singer who had gorgeous stringwriting on his stuff. Brazilian popular music has really nice stringwriting. Modern folk, folky pop, indie folk, or whatever you want to call it, Gregory Alan Isakov has some really nice stringwriting. Half Moon Run has gorgeous stringwriting. It’s a big part of most of the music that I love. It’s been really fun to incorporate it. I won’t stop any time soon, I don’t think.
Ken: What inspired you to call yourself Oddeline?
Marianne: That comes from a song by singer-songwriter from Portland named Alexandra Savior. She has a song called ‘Audeline.’ It’s spelled differently, though. Have you heard of her?
Ken: No, I haven’t.
Marianne: A lot of people haven’t. Every once in a while, I meet someone who says, “Is your name from Alexandra Savior?” It’s like an instant connection with those people, because I’m always surprised. Anyway, there’s a song that she has called ‘Audeline,’ which, in the lyrics, she’s describing a person. I identified with some of the lyrics in relation to how I wanted to do music and present myself as an artist. So, I changed the spelling, which is a classic modern-internet thing to do. I wanted to be sure it was googleable when I spelled it. It was pretty googleable when I spelled it. The obituary of a Russian lady or something came up. I was like, “Okay, I don’t think that this name is taken in the music industry, you know?” Also, I thought it sounded pretty and feminine.
Ken: That’s a great backstory. Some people just say, “I was just having lunch, and the name popped into my head.”
Marianne: I’m not very good at spontaneous things with creative stuff. For me, it stewed over for about two years before I made the decision. That’s who I am.
Ken: You have a bunch of things going on. You produced Mars Aspen’s song, ‘Overgrown,’ you collaborated with Sofar Sounds to organize two concert series, and you performed many live shows to date. Is there any particular role that you want to settle into down the line?
Marianne: I really like getting to have new experiences. Music is really a great way for me to do those things. I’m really just here for those reasons. I want to keep getting new experiences and working with people. I like meeting new people and seeing new places, too. I haven’t done a lot of that yet, but I have gotten to do a little bit of it. Basically, anything that will bring those things to me and bring me new and interesting positive experiences. That’s what I want to do more than thinking about the specific role that I want to have. Also, I just want to have a relatively stable, peaceful life, which means I need to make a little bit of money. I need to not always be busy 24 hours a day, every day of the week. So, really, just a balance between all of those things that I’m looking for and whatever brings me that, I’m down for.
Ken: I guess this relates to the previous question. Lastly, what does the future look like for Oddeline?
Marianne: It’s true. It does relate to the last question. To follow through with everything I just talked about. I think I’ve come to live my life and kind of make decisions based on the values that I have of spending time with good people, taking care of my personal relationships, going on adventures, having new experiences, creating high-quality stuff, and working with people that I think are really high quality. So, anything that brings me that. Also, I have a few shows in August that I’m working on and some recordings now. We’ll see what happens in the next couple of years. There are a lot of things going on in my personal life. For example, I’ve got some travel plans and stuff coming up. Really, though, I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing and see what opportunities come to me. This year, I’ve gotten to do really cool things like play at Bluesfest, be on CBC Radio One, and be in the studio producing an EP for somebody else, which is the first time I’ve done something like that. I’m just going to keep my head down and see what comes to me. If it feels good and it’s something I want to do, then I’ll do it. If not, then I won’t. I’ll just see what lies ahead and where I end up.
