We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maree Montagnini . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maree below.

Maree, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I wrote a song once as a joke, “Never a Wrong Time (to write a sad song)”…. I set it to a happy, upbeat melody, which was my idea of a joke, because its a song about how music is often born in sadness. Because what I’ve learned, from my own experience and listening to those around me who are also musicians and writers, is that creation and the ability to create is often been of strong emotion, and one of the strongest, most life changing feelings is pain. “Life is pain, Highness…” to quote The Princess Bride. I took up guitar and singing as a teenager because I had no outlet for what I was feeling. Music took those feelings out of me and gave me the space to process them. I held on to that method of coping throughout my adult life, through having five children, moving across the country several times, picking up and settling down more times than I can count. Music has always been a lifeline to me. However, I never tried to write my own songs until life became too much to handle. It was post pandemic, I’d given birth to my 5th child in the first year of covid, I was going through serious postpartum depression, I waa living in a new city and had no one to reach out to. And that was when I discovered I could write songs. And learning how to place pain and personal experience in a way that I could see it, could express it in a way that others could feel it for themselves, allowed me the freedom to turn something horrible into something that was beautiful to me.
Life has looked up since then. I quickly realized that music was meant to be shared and I could not hear my songs as solo compositions. So I made friends, started a band, decided I was going to do this professionally, and it’s been full steam ahead and growing as a musician and a professional for the past year. But I’ll never lose sight of where this all started, that there’s never a wrong time to write a sad song because someone is bound to get it, for suffering is universal and a key part of the human experience.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m Maree (Maria) Montagnini, the lead singer, songwriter, manager of my band, Uncommon Crossroads. We are a folk rock, country Americana that creates original music and refashions old time tunes, out of Tucson, Arizona. Our drummer is Michael Tarquin, a 25 year old veteran, entrepreneur, creative, and amazing human. He’s been working with me for a year now. Collin Gates, out of Phoenix, is our lead guitar player and vocalist. He’s my right hand man for running a business, staying on task, composing kickass guitar leads, and arranging vocal harmonies. Bryce J Rogers is both a dear friend and long time music biz associate who joins us on bass and stellar vocals when he’s not running his own independent music career. He keeps us relevant with videos, social media posts, and industry advise. What do we sound like? Uncommon, lol! Our sound starts with my writing and melodies, which are hugely influenced by 1960s folk music, vintage tunes from America and the British Isles, early country and rock musicians, and whatever else strikes my fancy that day. I write a song and bring to to the band, who interprets it in their own way. And together we create music.
We play to our crowd. Our job is that of entertainers… when you are booked for a show, you are there to give people a great experience. People like to hear what they already know, so it’s hard to break into a music scene and play original songs. However, that’s why I’m here, to play original music. We started out doing all original sets, and we’ve added covers that fit our sound and complement our own songs. We get great crowd appeal because the tunes and lyrics I write are based around sounds familiar to others. They’re the sort of songs you feel you’ve heard somewhere else before. But if you listen closely, you’ll appreciate that this is new music in the making.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

There were a lot of great questions to choose from for this topic, and I picked this one because it’s something I never appreciated before starting a band. And that is the nature of relationships within a band. If you’re a serious musician, your band mates become like family. You’re all doing the same thing together, all the time. You’re creating new music, which is a vulnerable, emotional, intense, outta body experience. It’s frustrating, exhilarating, exhausting, exciting. You have to trust the people around you to show them the early areas of a new song, be humble in accepting critique, be strong enough to not compromise on what’s crucial to you in your song, you gotta learn to communicate about what you want to hear, what you don’t. All of this creates close bonds and sense of connection and mutual achievement.
You’re also working together under stressful conditions, when your sound doesn’t work, a crowd is dead, the weather is shit, someone had a bad day. Music life brings out the best and worst in people and you learn to accept, encourage, accept encouragement, ask for help, give help.
Those circumstances bring people together. Your band knows and sees you like no one else can because it’s a unique experience of both creativity and business.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I love/hate this question lol!! Yes, and I hate telling people because I learned along time ago that if you tell people your dreams, they will laugh or talk down to you. But a much better friend recently told me something terrifying, called vocalization, where you actually say what you want to have happen. Fancy that! Well, I still think it’s safer to know what you want, work for it, and then surprise all the haters when you get it, but in the spirit of vulnerability and honesty, here goes. I want to be a well known, respected musician in the Americana music scene one day and that’s what I’m working towards. It’s a really fun goal because there’s no handbook, no solid advise, no road map, and even if you do everything right, you have to get lucky at some point, I suspect. It makes it even more fun to do this without money or connections. But what I have going for me are good lyrics, a marketable sound, great bandmates, and the ability to work harder than anyone I know lol.
So we’ll see!! Whatever comes of it, it’s a once in a life time experience to actually go after a crazy dream AND enjoy the ride.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.uncommoncrossroads.com
• Instagram: Uncommon Crossroads
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mareetheband?mibextid=ZbWKwL
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@uncommoncrossroads4513

Image Credits
Ameira Al Rudan Phil Kelly Montigue Eaton