Mariee Siou

Indie folk artist Mariee Siou will make her Mineral Point Opera House debut on Saturday, March 8, at 7:30 PM, with doors opening at 6:30 PM. Reserved tickets start at $25, plus Eventbrite fees. Multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Donnie CoCo will take the stage as the opening act.

Mariee Siou has been a fixture in the folk scene since her 2007 debut “Faces in the Rocks” — now acclaimed as a cult classic in the indie music world. She is revered for her delicate finger-picking and poetic mysticism, often drawing, as from the ether, immense feeling through a voice of soft potency and otherworldly wordsmithing. She is known as a healing singer and as a visionary artist, channeling and transmitting medicinal qualities through her music. Siou has extensively toured Europe and the US, and opened for acclaimed artists like Mazzy Star, Buffy St. Marie, Bert Jansch, Brightblack Morning Light, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and Joanna Newsom. In 2021 she played Le Guess Who? In Utrecht, Netherlands, at the invitation of Phil Elverum of The Microphones/Mt. Eerie, and she continues to tour the US and Europe.

Mariee Sioux Sobonya was born on the Humboldt coast in Arcata, California. When she was two her family moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California, to pursue their dream of farming and living off the land. She was raised on their small farm whose surrounding lands were originally occupied by the Nisenan people before the cultural and environmental decimation that occurred at the hands of expansionist migrants and settlers during the gold rush, and has come to be known as Nevada City (the Nisenan still survive in tragically small numbers and continue to fight for visibility and Federal recognition).

Siou has learned to more consciously embrace her role in the ancient and new tradition of healer-singers who have always helped hold the human social fabric together. Through music she attempts to fill a cultural void left by severed connections to her Polish, Hungarian, and Indigenous North American heritages and to thereby address the broader cultural voids felt by Americans today. She does this “with hopes of enticing the sacred work of grief back into our lives from the exile American society has placed it in” — and this is strongly evident in her 2019 release Grief in Exile, as well as in her forthcoming EP Circle of Signs.

The songs continue to come to Siou, and her approach as a singer continues to mature. The flowing melodies and quivering vibrato of her voice, as well as the poetry itself, continue to locate themselves and their work with a more solidly grounded precision as to just what that work is. Her most recent songs most deeply reflect this clarity of vision and acceptance of both her role as an artist and the endless need for that role in this changing world. Mariee Siou brings us back to the child and the grandmother in ourselves, in a time in which it has never been more needed — and she intends to keep it up as long as she has a voice.

Lifelong multi-instrumentalist and Philadelphia based singer-songwriter Donnie CoCo fearlessly explores the landscape of grief, modeling a determined and curious effort to grow upward from a place of pain. For fans of Jaala, Nai Palm, and Jeff Buckley—Donnie’s soulful voice and tongue-in-cheek lyrics haunt listeners as potently as their dynamic guitar finger-picking with playful musicality. Donnie CoCo’s debut single ‘Bad Word’ was recorded at Office Ours on Knox in Germantown and released independently in July 2024. It will be followed up with a full length record in 2025.