"Light must be recovered from darkness, even at the cost of life itself, if we are to become worthy of love."
J.R.R. Tolkien
For Michaela Foster Marsh, music is as much about paradox and contradiction as it is about strong waves of feeling. On stage, she has a hypnotic, almost ethereal quality, like an angel with hair the color of gold with it catches the soft red light of a fire. Her presence is nothing less than theatrical. When she sings, she has a range as wide as a starry winter sky and a voice that can be as gentle as a whisper before it swells to shake the rafters of an auditorium or to make the soul tremble.
But if her voice reaches to Heaven, her lyrics, rich with raw emotion, reach through the entire spectrum of human experience from the sacred to the profane. She sings of love and loss, healing and redemption, salvation and sex.
Shh. Listen.
There is substance and insight in her songs that will make you gasp or smile with wistful sadness.
Her piano compositions are as complex and sudden as a jazz improvisation, but her voice is sultry and seductive - part Loreena McKennitt and part Billie Holliday. She's also been compared to Kate Bush, Aimee Mann, Tori Amos, and even a female Elton John! Is there such a thing as torch folk? Michaela may have invented it.
Michaela laughs at the idea. "My music has been called everything from folk, new age, and world beat to alternative, pop, and even ambient electronic," she says with her lovely Scottish lilt. "Of course, I don't really care what people call it, so long as they listen. I love it when people come to me after a performance and tell me that my music made them smile, or even that it made them cry!"
Her lyrics mix the insight of the gritty and raw contemporary urban acoustic singer/songwriter with the mystic history of her Scottish homeland. Her songs speak of the longing for meaning and the sacred, the pain of loss, the joy of romantic love, and even the sometimes destructive power of sex. She's a latter-day bard with a piano instead of a harp.
When Michaela sings, you'll hear of makers and holy men, of fairytales and the death of innocence, of ticking time bombs and fallen angels, and of virgin goddesses weeping for lost lovers immortalized in the stars.
Most of all, Michaela's music is about an intense and even shocking journey within-a sometimes desperate quest for love, for meaning, and for healing. You see, there is a mythic core at the heart of her songs. Her music explores the primal, beautiful, and sometimes brutal archetypes that make up the patterns of legends and fairy tales as surely as they haunt the attics of our unconscious and give shape to our dreams.
Mythology and the universal archetypes of the collective unconscious give Michaela's music depth and resonance that strikes audiences on a level that often surprises them. "In mythological literature, the emphasis is often on the destructive powers of sexual attraction and the weakness, or unexpected heroism, of humans in contrast to the great and terrifying powers of nature and the gods," she explains.
"Rich with symbolism, the motifs in myth unleash our collective history and give us the keys to the labyrinths of our deepest psychic reality. Those are power ideas that I want to explore with my music. After all, mythological heroes struggled with the same complexities that torment the human spirit today, didn't they?
"Despite social and geographic dividers, mythology is universal. It has always remained mysteriously consistent, nation to nation and culture to culture. Unlocking these collective inner patterns reassures us that we aren't-and never have been-alone," Michaela says.
Myth and magic, meaning and archetype, love and loss, spirit and the sultry headiness of sex. When Michaela Foster Marsh plays, it is a form of prayer, sacred, sultry, and seductive. She sings the songs of the soul.
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