BY TAMMY SCILEPPI
A sultry, New York City siren and sexy “night creature” has re-discovered her darker side.
Jackson Heights songstress Virginia Marcs, is celebrating the holidays and New Year’s with “Wild,” her recently dropped music video. The song, which she wrote, is from her debut record “Climbing the Wall.”
Described as a deliciously lush fantasy and dazzling generational tale of self-destruction, “Wild” features a young woman who experiences a crazy night of wicked excess and chaos and Marcs’ unforgettable singing will keep you mesmerized.
The gods must’ve been smiling down upon Marcs’ seemingly destined collaboration with MTV VMA award-winning editor and director Alexander Hammer (Beyoncé, Lizzo). And, not surprisingly, the video is already making waves across New York City’s music scene and beyond.
The artist’s metamorphosis from “an opera singer going for pure vowels and pure tones, to jazz, swinging and jiving,” happened when she got her guitar. “I needed to rock sometimes, to scream. Now I have a bit of an in between, a balance. I whisper, I coo, I wail, I scream … all depending on the song,” she said.
No doubt this is an exciting time for the rising indie art-pop star — who’s “a proud member” of the Astoria Music Collective — as well as a turning point in her blossoming career, which flourished here in Queens.
Marcs said she often sings solo, though sometimes with a band, and she mostly performs in Astoria at the Irish Whiskey Bar, UKE Hut, The Quays, The Shillelagh Tavern, Singlecut Beersmiths, The Mad Donkey, The Local, and three times at Rockwood Music Hall (a dream of hers), among other locations.
“We rehearse a lot in what is colloquially known as ‘The Space’ underneath the old Bakeway, and also at Astoria Soundworks,” she added. “We hang and perform at LIC Bar. A huge part of my community lives in Astoria, so I spend a lot of time there.”
Marcs has performed at a few Queens festivals, including a Planned Parenthood benefit and Shore Fest in Astoria Park over the summer, where she does many photo shoots.
So, what was filming “Wild” like?
“It was so fun, but also so much work,” she said. “That corset! Ha, that was its own job! That bit where the girl is in the corset and someone assists her with their foot on the wall to pull … umm, yeah. That was us [she and Hammer] in a freezing basement last winter.”
“Alex is an amazing director and knows me so well — that young, wild and free part of me; the part I don’t let out so often anymore,” Marcs said of Hammer, who was her best friend from college. “He helped me feel organic and authentic in that again….
Looking back, there were “a lot of years partying and hanging with people to fill a void, to forget things, to burn things out of me,” she shared. “One day, I was just like, whoa. Would any of these people come to lunch with me, in the sun, and have a sober talk about things that actually matter? Like, do I wanna do that with them? It was really fun a lot of the time, but it left me standing still emotionally and lonely even in a crowd. The song is all about that. Not just my life and story, but also what I observed around me.”
Talking about the many weird, but amazing alignments in her life, the singer explained, “When I’m on the right path, the stars align across my life like a map. I couldn’t make up something so bizarre.”
Marcs is currently running her second crowdfunding campaign, this time to fund her forthcoming EP, “Reckoning,” for which videos of all five tracks will be created and released over the course of 2020, with the final EP dropping in March 2021.
