One has to believe the “existential dread of staring into the night-sky for too long” has an impact on all of one’s creative pursuits: enter Chloé Marie, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who just located from Baton Rouge to follow her heart and her dreams. Born and raised in Louisiana’s capital city, she relocated to New Orleans last June, in the middle of pandemic panic, and states she has no regrets. It’s the music that keeps her going.
“I’ve always been involved with music in one way or another throughout the course of my life, from being in orchestras and choirs when I was younger, to performing in musical theatre productions, to starting my professional career about eight years ago when I started singing with bands around my hometown. Music has just always been an integral part of my life. What inspires me shifts pretty frequently but some of the most common things are, of course, my lived experiences and the people in my life. A lot of times when I’m writing music, I’m not even currently in that space mentally, I’m just exorcising the left-over energy of a person, or feeling, or idea, or situation, that I just can’t hold in any longer, if that makes sense. Inspiration for me usually comes in the form of something intangible. That buzz you feel all over your body after seeing an engaging performance. That gut-sinking feeling when you hear something you wish you hadn’t. The existential dread of staring into the night-sky for too long (if you’re at all like me haha.) These are the general types of things that inspire me and fuel my creative process.”
While Chloé Marie is making headway with music, she also has a sweet new gig about town that most people would kill for: puppeteer and puppet star of the new Louisiana Public Broadcasting/PBS Network show Ziggy’s Art Adventure. The new Jim Henson/Sesame Street-like series takes place in The Junkyard, replete with posters of local Baton Rouge and New Orleans bands. It’s probably the only muppet show you’ll ever see with a Tom Petty poster hovering in the neon Caribbean colored background. By happenstance and a lil’ magic, Chloé Marie plays Cynthia, a character who is more musically inclined than her other artistic comrades.
“Clay Achee, a friend of mine, reached out to ask if I wanted to do some of the music for the show and sing for [a] character. That was my initial job offer and they were looking for a puppeteer,” she explains. (Clay used to book her for music venues in her home town).
She won not only the opportunity to create music for the innovative new digital series about a curious ALF-like character who comes to Earth to learn about the arts, but also was cast as Cynthia. OffBeat asked her if her guitar playing helped her in any way to prep for the role of a puppeteer and she emphatically exclaimed it does not.
“I’m still pretty new to playing [guitar] which I developed through quarantine. I had absolutely no interest in puppeteering until [Clay] asked me! I got on-the-job training and I went into it completely blind with no previous skillset,” she says. “Of course I watched the Muppets and Sesame Street but I wouldn’t say I ever had the desire to [puppeteer] specifically or ever thought about the magic behind it. Of course I was in love with Sesame Street as a kid but this [opportunity] was completely new.”
Chloé Marie describes the set that is anywhere yet specifically somewhere, a junkyard that most likely exists right here in New Orleans.
“It’s not really a distinct location and I think that it does look like something you can identify is something the creative team was going with,” she says, with a nod to the art department who were sure to ingratiate Baton Rouge and New Orleans bands into the “crazy” landscape.
When she is not puppeteering these days, Chloé Marie has two musical projects, both impressive in their own right.
“The first band I started in 2016 is Alabaster Stag. That’s m five-piece group. We’ve played a lot in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans and opened for cool people. But the last couple months I’ve been working on a solo album with a different group under the name Chloé Marie.” Notably the group has performed with Tank and the Bangas, Boyfriend, Flow Tribe, Anna Wise, and Seratones.
“The biggest difference is just the amount of creative control as a solo artist I have versus that of working in a band. I love the collaborative nature of Alabaster Stag—we have a way of writing that has developed over the years that works as a group. But as a solo project I have stockpiles of songs that are really personal to me and I don’t want to change too much. I’m more looking for people to enhance what I already have because when you are with a band it ends up a a whole new thing once a band adds to it. It’s so nice to be able to completely express my voice. It’s personal with a specific feel.”
Coyly, I ask her if she believes in lyrics over melody first.
“Recently, with the material I’ve been writing, it’s really coinciding with my progress on guitar. A lot has started out with cool chord progressions I’m trying to polish on guitar and I’ll end up playing a couple notes that give me a melody that I build off of. That’s kind of where I’ve been starting recently and play it and see what happens recording with my phone. It’s a stream of consciousness! I just listen take and build off what I love.”
As of now, Chloé Marie is almost done with an entirely new recording process. She will be launching a Kickstarter campaign very soon to “record horns and strings in the next two sessions at Earthship Records in Baton Rouge with Ben Livingston.” And there’s even more—the campaign will fund “the album creation process, including a short film-style slasher movie music video for the lead single, ‘One of Many!’”
“Myself, Ben Livingston and one of my co-writers, Tim Marchand, had a writing session [recently] and picked out each song and wrote parts for every single song. we actually just had the first horn session last night and while they did play the parts we had written already, they also added a lot of their own flavor and played a major part in creating and bringing the horn lines to life.” Chloé Marie is speaking of Jeremi Gilley, David Melancon, and Joshua Ratner.
She’s talking business and she means it.
“Baton Rouge music is more of a blues town. There is absolutely not as much as infrastructure for music as there is in New Orleans which is why I relocated but you can hear it on Third Street. My inspirations are all over the place. You’ll hear that on the album! I’m honestly inspired more so by jazz and psychedelic rock music that I’ve listened to since I was a teenager,” she declares.
What may be the most surprising, is that after a brief back and forth about No Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” Chloe Marie says she loves “strong female singers.”
“I love strong female singers – Ella Fitzgerald and Grace Slick are my favorites. They come from totally different worlds and yet played such a huge part in my musical development.”
Speaking of Gwen Stefani and being a woman in the music industry, Chloé Marie states: “As I’ve gotten older and been in more professional environments, it’s definitely something that we’ve got a long way to go. It took several years for people to stop speaking over me or seeing me as a bandleader because they assumed one of the guys was in charge. Men expect you to know a little less and underestimate you. It’s such a boys’ club and it seems natural for men to gravitate to the other men in the room instead of addressing me as an equal. I’ve had to work very hard throughout the years to build a reputation that I can respond to emails, book myself. It’s definitely a battle sometimes.”
Follow Chloé Marie on Instagram here and be sure to check out her Kickstarter campaign when it launches. OffBeat will update this story when the Kickstarter link is available.
