Meet Tori Maries

I’m Tori Maries, a musician living in Bristol (aren’t we all?), where at some point of the month you can find me playing my green racing car-like guitar and singing. I spent my schooling years, brief as they were, in the Midlands and now go home to The Isle of Mull (Balamory, if that’s on your radar).

How did you get into playing music?

Having grown up with my dad as a music teacher, I’ve always been around dusty pianos, a lot of stringed instruments, and waiting around in studios. There was always just this understanding of music being part of my staple diet, without it ever really been talked about. I don’t really recall when I started writing or messing around with instruments. It’s always been that way and not until I moved out of home did I realise how this was the most privileged and richest start.

What inspires you as a musician?

It sounds like a cop out to say ‘everything inspires me’, so I won’t. In all honesty, it is the rawness of people or situations that just culminate in melody chords and words, because that’s the way my own selfish mind can make sense of it. Sometimes euphorically, other times to offer myself sympathy and often to just feel. It’s a pretty self-indulgent thing, to write alone, I think. So I like the idea of honesty, however it’s dressed and rawness, because that’s a shared truth, for better or worse.

For a while you sang with Holika, was that a good experience?

I spent a fair few years writing and performing with past project Holika. They were years of high and lows, as any band knows. I learnt a lot and greatly respect everybody’s musical talents that lent themselves to Holika.

You’re now a solo artist how does that differ from playing with a band?

I feel as though I have only really begun to perform as a solo artist over the past few months. I remember going to The Old Duke’s open mic on a Tuesday night with songs I’d only ever played to the wall, and it was terrifying, I fluffed all the words, hurried through my one song and cycled home as fast as I could, perplexed at what on earth I was going to do. Personally, I think no matter how good you are or aren’t, performing solo requires a massive respect. Wonderful as it has started to feel, it also can feel like the ultimate juxtaposition to place something that feels natural in an unnatural environment.

My technical abilities as a musician constantly require work, and I have so much to learn.

Performance-wise, to keep hold of that rawness and to keep it true to itself, is something I am working towards, and hope I can continue too.

Can you tell us more about the material you’re performing at the moment?

The material I am currently performing and writing is all relatively new- sometimes as new as ‘that morning’. I have a set that I wrote around the theme of my self-produced demo EP What Tools are Useful? but I am constantly writing, changing, making things better, making things worse, experimenting, procrastinating.

I have met some of the most inspiring, beautiful people over the past couple of years, and there stories will creep in one way or another. The door is on the latch.

What’s been your best live experience?

I’ve had a lot of great experiences playing live with Holika over the years, but my favourite live solo experience came just a couple of weeks ago, playing at the old bookshop.

Something clicked that hadn’t before, my hands where on auto pilot, I could look everybody in the eye, and I didn’t feel as much as a fraud as I have done before.

I’d been faking this ‘at ease’ persona for a bit, and I wasn’t faking it any more, I genuinely felt at ease. It was an intimate gig of a handful of people and it was the first time I’d felt totally cool with the intensity of it. From that first Tuesday night at the Old Duke to then, it was huge. I’d only ever visualised feeling that calm till then. It was cool.