“I don’t take much influence from people generally,” states Marissa Nadler. “When I’m writing records, I try not to listen to modern stuff, so I won’t get influenced.”
Two-plus decades into her career, Nadler dog-ears the same reliable pages of the Great American Songbook. Bob Dylan’s storytelling. John Fahey’s American primitive guitar, which extends its lineage through her intimate fingerpicking.
“I play with thumb and one finger, a variety of Piedmont blues,” Nadler explains, imitating her guitar grip in the same Nashville room she recorded in. Her playing takes center stage on New Radiations, out Aug 15 via Sacred Bones. Mixed by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O)))) and featuring Milky Burgess’ slide guitar, New Radiations retains the otherworldly narrative lenses of 2022’s The Path of the Clouds while shedding its wider instrumentation back down to basics.
“Randall would mention, ‘Let’s not keep this in there. It eats up all the space,’” Nadler says. “The choice whether to keep or remove certain riffs helped open up the songs. I had a tendency in the past to not leave enough space. Getting older, you learn to walk away from things. Like walking away from a painting when it’s done, not putting more icing on it.”
Space is the vantage point throughout New Radiations. “It Hits Harder” imagines a real-life woman coping with a break-up by orbiting the world in her Cessna. Nadler likens the song to The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “really serious subject matter, but to whoever this gets across to, it’s tongue-in-cheek. Exaggerated.”
Forlornness returns on “You Called Her Camellia,” which earns country cred on the lyrical “turnaround” of “this wasn’t the deal.” “I imagined Bob Dylan saying that,” she says, “slang colloquialisms for the disappointment of falling out of love.”
Nowadays, Nadler takes different lessons from the musicians who were formative since her career beginnings in Providence. “Returning to my early work, and thinking about people like Dylan with decades-long careers, I wonder if there are records he’d throw away completely,” she muses. “As I get older, people I’ve idolized become more human. Growing up, we didn’t have the ability to Google musicians. You couldn’t find out anything about anybody without going to a library or reading CD liner notes. Now it’s like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and seeing the person behind it. Work ethic alone makes a great songwriter, not innate magic.”
In her 2007 cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” the fingerpicking sounds tenser, pressured against Cohen’s original. New Radiations’ guitar melodies sound relaxed, self-assured, chords filling the space like warm drafts of wind.
After upscaling on The Path of the Clouds, paring things down had practical reasons too. “I recorded this album partly because touring with a band was difficult,” Nadler explains. “I wanted to be able to play every song from start to finish. No drummers, nothing.
“Sometimes people come to my shows and say, ‘I like you so much better solo, stripped down. Lose the band.’ If I play solo they’ll say, ‘Get the band.’ You can’t make everyone happy, but for now, this feels right. I can hop in a car and play a gig, and not shy away from performing intimate stuff. Some of the best concerts I’ve seen were just one or two people on stage. In high school in Boston I saw Neil Young play the Orpheum, Elliott Smith at Avalon. Both were hugely affecting, how you can make fragile music that reaches people. You don’t need to get the crowd rocking out to move them.”
New Radiations is out today, and you can order it from Sacred Bones Records. Follow Marissa Nadler on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates.
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz
