The Search for Geek: Kari Maaren

We first met Kari last July when Debs’s high school friend, author Leah Bobet, introduced her to us on Twitter! Errol was super excited and immediately invited her to go to a Fringe play with him and then dragged her to a house filk. Kari plays an awesome ukulele and writes hilariously geeky songs. She’s also a visual artist with her very own web comic.

Basic Stats

Name: Kari Maaren
Instruments: Ukulele for the geeky stuff, but I also play piano, accordion, mandolin, tenor guitar, flute, and various whistles.
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Year Formed: : I am not a band, so this question is puzzling…but I started performing geeky music in late 2011.
Genre: Geeky ukulele? Does that count as a genre? My style is mostly folky. There’s been some bluegrass and pseudo-jazz in there from time to time. I do lead a non-geeky band that plays mostly bluegrass and Celtic folk.
Favourite Fandom:  Not sure. I’ll claim Tolkien, fairy tales, and Batman with a splash of Doctor Who, just to be random.

What is your geek origin story?

I didn’t have many friends when I was a kid. After a particular incident in which some classmates told a cruel joke about me and my best friend laughed, I didn’t have any. I took refuge in books. I was reading Shakespeare for fun by the age of twelve or so, but I also loved fantasy and science fiction. Now I lean more towards fantasy, but I was on a real Arthur C. Clarke run for a while there. I read as many comics as I could; at that time, it was mostly newspaper comics, as I didn’t really have access to other kinds, but I used to sneak off to the library and read old collections of Superman comics in the stacks. I didn’t realise any of this stuff was geeky because no one told me.

I also have a mania for fairy tales, and not the Disney kind. When I say this, people often go, “Oh, you mean real fairy tales, like ones by the Brothers Grimm!” I am such a terrible pedant that I immediately launch into a diatribe about how the Brothers Grimm actually bowdlerised the fairy tales they collected, taking out the uncomfortable sexy bits and replacing all the psychopathic mothers with stepmothers. They left in most of the violence, though. If you want to encounter some genuinely dark fairy tales, go beyond the Brothers Grimm, though they’re a great place to start.

Ukuleles have become really popular over the last few years, but you began playing one long before that. How did you first get started (and learn so much)?

I’ve played instruments almost since before I could walk. My parents sent me to piano lessons in elementary school, but they didn’t take; I hated to practise. Only once I stopped the lessons did I really start to teach myself how to play the piano, and I now play mostly by ear, though I also have an understanding of theory because I took flute lessons later on. The ukulele was the instrument my parents gave me (for Christmas or my birthday; I forget which) when I was about eight and asked for an instrument of my very own. I’m entirely self-taught. I still have the chord book that came with my first ukulele thirty years ago; it’s almost worn out now. I’ve played the ukulele off and on. Occasionally, other instruments have taken precedence, but I’ve always returned to the uke as a performance instrument. Like many uke players who started as children, I’ve developed my own style and techniques. There are some things I’m still completely incapable of doing, and there are some things I’ve just sort of figured out. My strength is probably finger-picking, while my weakness is the fact that I generally stick to the basic keys.

Tell us about your very first song.

What? Really? I don’t even remember what that was. I was probably about ten. I spent most of my teen years writing stories and songs. I don’t have any idea which song came first. I do remember writing this series of horrible musicals in my late teens and early twenties. They were drenched in sentimentality and probably owed a lot to The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, since at the time, those were the only musicals I knew (I know better now). The first of the musicals was about pirates. I was quite devastated when I discovered the existences of The Pirates of Penzance, since I hadn’t known about Gilbert and Sullivan before that. I was kind of an ignorant kid. The pirate musical was meant as a vicious satire of some sort, and it was horribly tragic but supposedly funny at the same time. I don’t know. I do still like pirates quite a lot.

I should also say that I eventually moved on to writing musicals of which I was not ashamed. My friend Ben Fortescue and I co-wrote and produced one, Cross Purposes, for the Calgary Fringe Festival in 2009. It was about murder, not pirates.

Two things that struck us when we were first introduced to you was your quirky way of approaching topics and the depth of your lyrics; clever and yet really accessible. We’d love to hear more about your songwriting process and how you find your angles and inspiration.

Well, I’ve always liked working with funny rhyming verse, and I’ve always had a strong ear for scansion. I had a high-school English teacher who used to mutter loudly to herself when she saw my poetry, “I hate it when they insist on rhyming.” She managed to convince me that rhyming verse was shameful, and she put me off it for years, but I guess because I knew that songs rhymed too, I regarded music as a Rhyme-Safe Zone.

The songs mostly just happen. Sometimes I’ll have an idea, and it’ll be connected to a particular recurring line or fragment of verse. “Kids These Days,” my vampire song, happened that way. I just had this image of a traditional vampire baffled by an influx of sulky young vampires who kept announcing they were angsty and wanted to sparkle in the sun. “Kids these days” was the recurring line, and the song slowly built itself around that. I had a fragment of melody that went along with the line as well. Sometimes the melody comes at the same time as the words, and sometimes it comes later. Often, the refrain, especially if it’s only one or two lines long, comes into being because it’s associated with a particular melody in my mind.

As far as the geeky music goes, it’s going to take a bit of explaining. It started, in a roundabout way, with publishing. In 2011, I worked as a slush reader for ChiZine Publications (CZP), a small (now mid-sized) Toronto SF publisher. I started going to the Chiaroscuro Reading Series (or Chiseries for short), which CZP held on a monthly basis. In the spring, there was a special edition of the Chiseries, and one of the scheduled musicians dropped out, so my friend Helen Marshall, who was one of the organisers, asked me to bring my keyboard and sing a song. I had no idea what I was doing at that point. I suggested maybe the ukulele would be more portable, as well as less obnoxious, since nobody there actually knew who I was, and I didn’t want to turn up with this giant instrument in a wheely case and start demanding a place to plug it in. I didn’t sing one of my own songs that time, since I didn’t have one prepared; I did “The Toronto Song” by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. People enjoyed it, and I was asked back for the Christmas special. I had more time to prepare, and I decided to write my own Christmas song. It was about zombies, of course. In my mind, zombies and Christmas are closely associated.

After that, I was asked back for Valentine’s Day, and then I just sort of became a regular, playing two original songs in between the acts at every Chiseries. This brings me all the way back to the actual question. I tend to be inspired by the fact that I’m writing for a bunch of lit geeks. Because CZP leans towards dark fantasy and horror, some of my songs do have a tinge of horror that I don’t think is usual in filk. Horror is, in many ways, all about ferreting out anxieties and prodding them with a stick, and that’s something I’m happy to do. Even my non-horror-based songs tend to revolve around poking holes in assumptions. For instance, I kind of hate love songs, so naturally, I’ve written a bunch of them. “I’ll Still Love You When I’m Gone” takes the idea of eternal love and turns it into a macabre meditation on obsession; the narrator claims she (my narrators are often gender neutral, though I myself am inevitably not, but I’ll just stick with “she” for now) will still love the object of her affection when she’s dead…and will reinforce this love with horrible violence if necessary. A less cynical love song, “Sasquatch,” is, in some ways, a reversed Cinderella story about a Sasquatch who falls in love with large footprints in the mud but is so solitary by nature that he prefers never to meet the creature who made them. Poke. Poke. Poke.

One more thing worth noting in this extremely long answer is that a lot of my songs are written from monstrous perspectives. They don’t take a “Monsters are just misunderstood and are really nice underneath” approach, either. It’s more like, “Hi, guys, I’m a monster. Let me be monstrous for a bit here. Isn’t this fun? I think I’ll eat your eyeballs now.” The song that gives its title to my first solo album, “Beowulf Pulled My Arm Off,” is a cheerful ditty in which Grendel, the first monster that turns up in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, explains how he’s okay with having been killed horribly because after all, he ended up in an epic poem. Dude.

Speaking of albums, you’ve released not one but TWO in the past month. Can you tell us about them?

It makes me look really industrious, doesn’t it?  Actually, it was an accident.  I recorded the first album, Beowulf Pulled My Arm Off, in October of 2012, but due to a series of unfortunate events, the guy doing the recording didn’t get the mastered version to me until April of 2013.  Then the artist who was making the cover art was busy too, so I had to wait some more.  It was worth it, though, since the artist was Erik Mohr, and he drew me a sad Grendel sitting in his living room, mourning the loss of his arm.  The album collects fourteen of the songs I performed at the Chiseries in 2011 and 2012.

In the meantime, I played at a filk concert at the Toronto Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in the spring of 2013.  There were a lot of other performers from Toronto’s filk community there.  Leslie Hudson and Devin Melanson played two songs about The Princess Bride.  I had met Leslie once before at a filk circle, but it was my first time meeting Devin.  A few days later, he e-mailed me to suggest a collaboration; he wanted to make a CD showcasing a few of my songs and a few of his and Leslie’s songs.  He invited me to Ancaster to record.  So I ended up riding the GO Train to get to the house of this guy I’d met once so I could record songs in his sound-proof basement studio.  Fun!

This second album ended up coming out before the one I recorded in October.  Devin is an extremely efficient guy.  The album is called Pirate Elves in Space because it involves songs about Star Wars (Leslie and Devin),The Princess Bride (Leslie and Devin again), and J. R. R. Tolkien (me).  We also included my song about Sherlock Holmes, “Being Watson,” but alas, we couldn’t fit that into the title.  We debuted the album at FilKONtario, an awesome convention held in Toronto in late April.