By
Phil Leckman
Arizona Daily Wildcat.
Indie rock band Rainer Maria makes the personal poetic
It has won acclaim around the country, and Look Now Look Again, its latest album, made Spin magazine's list of top 20 albums of 1999. But Connecticut three-piece Rainer Maria, which plays Solar Culture tomorrow night at 9, is still touring in a Chevrolet Suburban and playing before a hundred people a night.
And the band members say they like it that way.
"It's a really fun level right now," said guitarist and singer Kyle Fischer. "The tours are relatively worry-free, the crowd is good almost every night... and we don't have a lot of the headaches that would come with the next level."
Rainer Maria began five years ago in Madison, Wis. when Fischer met bassist and lead singer Caithlin De Marrais.
When the band Fischer and drummer William Kuehn played in broke up, they asked De Marrais to join their new project. The band has since relocated to Connecticut.
"Kyle and I were in a poetry class together, and we really liked each other's work and enjoyed each other's company," De Marrais said.
The band is named after Rainer Maria Rilke, a renowned Austrian poet, but the name was not chosen with Rilke's work in mind. Rather, said Kuehn, the members just liked the way the poet's name sounded.
"It's just sonically the best thing that we could come up with. There's no direct relation to his work - we don't sit down and read a couple poems and then write a song or something like that," he said.
Nevertheless, said Kuehn, the poetic image the group's name and background conjures up is probably not entirely unwarranted.
"They (De Marrais and Fischer) write such amazing lyrics that if we're known as a 'poet band' I guess that's fine," Kuehn said.
These lyrics may have a lot to do with the band's success - when coupled with the band's swirling melodies and De Marrais's intense-yet-vulnerable voice, the result makes an immediate personal connection with many fans.
"Kyle and I were writers and not musicians first," De Marrais said. "We are very careful about the words that we choose - we're constantly editing and re-editing."
De Marrais said she credits this careful writing process for the kinship many fans feel with the band's lyrics.
"It's good to be really specific, even if you're not revealing the exact situation behind the lyrics," she said.
"We seem to do our best work when we start with the kernel of something that's very true," Fisher added. "When you let the cat out of the bag, let someone in on a little bit of a secret."
But Fischer also stressed that it is important not to reveal too much.
"There's a balancing act that makes good art - stepping around something or nodding in its direction rather than giving it all away, but at the same time not being too general," he said.
If its critical success is any indication, Rainer Maria has managed this balancing act quite well.
