Marissa Nadler concedes that when asked about her influences, she gives a disappointing answer: “I don’t take much influence from people generally.
“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 as she’s always done. Bob Dylan’s storytelling. John Fahey’s American primitive guitar, which extends its lineage through her intimate fingerpicking. (Hayden Pedigo plays in the primitive tradition as well.)
“I play with thumb and one finger, a variety of Piedmont blues,” Nadler explains over Zoom, imitating her guitar grip in the same Nashville room she recorded in. Her playing takes center stage on New Radiations, out August 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 isn’t just the echoing atmosphere building around New Radiations; it’s the vantage point. “To Be the Moon King” takes from Robert Goddard, the eccentric father of modern rocketry. “It Hits Harder” imagines a real-life woman, Valentina Tereshkova, coping with a break-up by orbiting the world in her Cessna. Nadler likens the latter 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.”
It’s far from the only song on New Radiations that subverts old-school tropes with narrative distance. “Hatchet Man” is a deceptively high-strung murder ballad where the singer is neither the killer nor the killed; she’s the woman brought to the hotel room to watch it happen. Another ballad, “You Called Her Camellia,” comes from the position of a man left in the dust as his lover rides full-throttle into the sunset. To Nadler it earns an extra bit of country cred on the lyrical “turnaround” of “this wasn’t the deal.”
“I imagined Bob Dylan saying that,” she explains, “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. She says, “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. 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.”
On 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 slowly filling the space like warm drafts of wind.
After upscaling on The Path of the Clouds, paring things down also came with practical reasons. “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 on August 15th, via Sacred Bones Records.
