Poolblood’s Maryam Said on taking time out, vampires, platonic love, and vulnerability

Photo by Kate Killet.

On a long enough timeline, the distance between events becomes elastic, experiences blur together, we lose days to faulty memory. Simultaneously, days can feel like weeks, months like years. Or, as Maryam Said sums it up at the start of a demo for the new track “My Little Room,” their latest Poolblood offering and a first glimpse at the project’s debut full length, “Time is an illusion.”

An intimate, unadorned acoustic rumination propelled by a music box guitar melody, it’s a quarantine song first and foremost cataloguing feelings and behaviours related to the challenges of interacting with a reduced environment, tapping into our meme-level collective reckoning with the fourth dimension in familiar but profound ways.

“I spent the last year writing for this record and just processing everything about this time and other things in my life,” Said explains over a video call. They say the song speaks to the unfolding of that process. Early in the pandemic, they left downtown Toronto and moved into a new place on the opposite side of Mississauga with their parents, their bedroom doubling as an ad hoc studio. “That’s kind of where I’ve been, trying to make it a space that can be creative and exciting so that when I wake up I’m not depressed about the whole pandemic. I’ve been trying to really focus on making it a lively space, so just setting up my little recording space better and putting up more artwork, and just making it really liveable for myself.”

Opportunities like the monthly revenue share events Bandcamp held throughout 2020 encouraged them to let tracks like “My Little Room” trickle out as demos and give audiences a window into her process, but they’ve also careful to balance the hamster wheel content cycle and the abundance of free time by letting ideas breathe and manifest.

“I try to make one song every three or four months,” they estimate. It’s a production timeline worlds apart from the whirlwind circumstances that precipitated Poolblood’s 2019 EP Yummy. That release was recorded over just three days in Philadelphia with Accidental Popstar Records founder Shamir, lyrics for tracks like “Memoir” made up on the spot and recorded the next day. By comparison, writing their full length has coincided with “a lot of staring at my walls trying to come up with things, rereading old journals and seeing what makes sense to write about right now.”

Hashed out alone in their room with an acoustic guitar, they say the new songs embrace a newfound vulnerability, and Said hopes to preserve the rawer sentiments on the album by including acoustic tracks among the noisier fare more typical of Yummy’s angsty hi-fi power pop.

“I think on the last record I was very nervous to say a lot of things – there were songs where I definitely said what I needed to say, but I didn’t have the confidence that I feel like I have now to say what I really want to say and really be vulnerable,” they say. “It just sucks this year because it’s so much fun when you’re in a room with your friends and you’re making music and it’s just a huge vibe. And then being in your room and there’s no space between your bed and where you record and things like that… it’s hard.” 

“I’ve been waiting a / quarter of a century / and now I’m living / in a memory,” they sing on “My Little Room” – a tragic expression suggesting a coming of age, unrequited expectation for temporal milestones, disappointment for having failed to embrace the present and missing opportunities.

Said frequently invokes time in the Poolblood universe in terms that are cosmic and cosmological. Around the release of Yummy, they describe that work as “an ode to every water sign” in its press materials while self-identifying through birth chart signifiers as “a Cancer sun/Capricorn rising/Virgo moon who grew up a pop punk,” and skulls stare on prominently in the cover art and promotional images like watchful memento moris.

Teen movies like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You fuelled that release’s conception; this time, Said’s found themself reaching to vampire stories like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, Let the Right One In, and Bill Gunn’s ’70s arthouse blaxploitation horror Ganja & Hess for inspiration, and they say the resulting album will explore ideas related to platonic relationships.

It’s a surprising impulse given how vampire lore has traditionally been mined to represent lust and sexual tension on screen, but Said says the stories appeal to them because “there’s this idea of being in a pact.” With that context, “My Little Room” could also be read as an immortal vampire’s inner dialogue waiting to reconvene centuries-old friendships from the stuffy confines of a weighty sarcophagus.

It’s all just a matter of time.

Poolblood premieres a video for “My Little Room” directed by Kate Killet 8PM EST tonight (Jan. 16, 2021) on Long Winter TV. Purchase the demo at Bandcamp (proceeds directly benefit Toronto’s Encampment Support Network).