Rainer Maria
three piece emo band from Madison, Wisconsin
Rainer Maria is an American emo band from Madison, Wisconsin, later residing in Brooklyn, New York. The band was originally active from 1995 to 2006 and reunited in 2014. They have released six full-length albums, a live DVD, and numerous live recordings and EPs.
History
Caithlin De Marrais, Kaia Fischer and William Kuehn formed the band in late summer of 1995 and named it after the German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In its earlier days, the band had a dual male and female vocal line-up; later, De Marrais would become the lead vocalist in a majority of their songs. The gender ambiguity of the name Rainer Maria paralleled this and was one of the reasons it was selected as the band's name.
The band's many tours and intimate live shows at venues such as Brooklyn's North Six (which lead singer Caithlin De Marrais referred to as "home" during her final show because it also served as the band's rehearsal space), Washington, D.C.'s Black Cat, the Bowery Ballroom in NYC, and Chapel Hill's Cat's Cradle helped to grow its fan base and fuel album sales.
On November 6, 2006, the band announced, through Pitchfork Media, that the December 16th show at New York City's Bowery Ballroom would be their last. It was accompanied by this statement:
"We are grateful to our new listeners and especially our longtime fans for their endless support and attention. We feel incredibly fortunate to have come up during a unique time in rock music, in a community that grew with us from the Midwest to Brooklyn and beyond.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rainer Maria” as three piece emo band from Madison, Wisconsin. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7284825. VIAF identifies the subject as 124678599. The Library of Congress control number is no2003037214. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2006 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rainer Maria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.