Showing Voice: An Interview with Marissa Nadler

As far as concert-going etiquette goes, a raised lighter feels like an inherently reflective gesture. Here I am, it says, a beacon of participation. In reaction to the holistic object—a song, a voice, a moment shared in time—a raised lighter exists in acknowledgement and graciousness. And if the (omni)presence of smartphones at live events is readily accepted as the pits, it is perhaps worth further clarifying: everything about a raised smartphone indicates an equal, opposite urge of the lighter. It captures an instance for the spectator and creates an archive for one or none, all at the risk of alienating the performer and avoiding the shared moment.

I’ve been thinking about screens at concerts. There are jumbotrons and their slightly more manageable brethren, the ‘concert screen’, that broadcasts a musician’s gestures and face tics to the lawn seats. And then there is the perhaps uniquely 21st Century view from the back of a house, amphitheater, or arena, the periodic raising and lowering of a small army of small screens, all attached to small cameras. But, like the tentative-speculative relationship between screen and spectator, for every capitulation to attention economies is an emergent possibility for the moving image. What are the stakes for thinking about live concerts in collaboration with cinematic techniques? A 2022 Rebekah Del Rio concert at the Philadelphia Film Society saw the singer perform in front of that theater’s formidable red curtain, a flanging and snaking mix of lights, lenses, and gobos creating a texture on top of the live performance. And then Mulholland Drive (2001) was projected, the early “live” performance of “Llorando” meeting the celluloid one, an acknowledgement somewhere between history, memory, and melodics. 

Marissa Nadler is no stranger to texture and tactility, in voice and life. Since her 2004 debut, Ballads of Living and Dying—a title which, with a slight rearview, feels like a partial mission statement for her songwriting—the D.C.-born, Nashville-based musician has composed a living songbook of Gothic flecked-folk, a memory-variation of heavy metal that moves the ductile and the tinny into shimmery, tendrilled motion. The work is as meticulously sound-scaped as it is wrung raw in the way a voice interacts with a given stretch of air. “Voice” permeates much of the writing about and around Nadler’s music, usually as an inadequate attempt to describe in words the ineffable. Again, with a little rearview: when Nadler sings “Nothing feels the same”, placing a drum stop eternity between ‘nothing’ and ‘feels’, the words double our understanding. Nothing feels the same since but nothing feels the same as anything else. A voice isn’t knowable by critical or figurative language, just as a feeling isn’t quantifiable in a song. We are always crafting a relationship, the music an expression of exchange, not reduction.

There is a careful attention to this relationship—between art and life, between voice and noise, between image and memory—at play in Nadler’s songwriting, from those early Eclipse albums to 2021’s The Path of the Clouds. In advance of her June 15th performance at the New Jersey International Film Festival, I spoke to Marissa over video chat about the impact a fine arts background has on songwriting, the imagery inside composition, and the work and dream of film scores.

MN: The guy that runs the festival, Al [Nigrin], he's a fan of my music, and he asked me to play. He's been interested in my fine artwork too. We've become friends and he seems like a cool guy—I'm looking forward to meeting him in person. And I don't think I've really played in New Jersey very much over the years. Maybe once.

MN: I don't. I mean, I love Bruce Springsteen. That's kind of the first thing I think about when I think of ‘New Jersey music’. But I know that there's much more to it. So yes and no. 

MN:  I'm just approaching it as a concert. But now that you mention it, it would make a lot of sense to put together a visual component. I'm adding that to my to-do list. I know Al talked about wanting to do some collaboration, so maybe I'll ask him to put together something for it. I do have a big interest in eventually making soundtracks or ambient music for film. I feel at home with the people who would maybe go to a film festival.

MN: I think in part because of my background as a fine artist, I just see the world more visually than not. When I think of memories, I think of their visuals. It's hard to explain but I do think that everybody sees the world a little bit differently. So the way that I write is very visual, descriptive, I guess.

MN: It really depends on the song. For my last record, The Path of the Clouds, I set a few writing exercises for myself. A few of the songs—like “Bessie Did You Make It”, for instance—were based on real stories from episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. I found myself watching the show, and I got the idea of an inverted murder ballad, from a woman’s perspective. It's kind of like fan fiction, but every song has a slightly different inspiration. I try to picture it. Like when I tried to write that song, or other ones that were inspired by true events, I tried to visually time travel to paint a picture that makes the lyrics interesting.

Joni Mitchell, who's obviously a big influence on modern songwriting in general, is especially inspiring to me as somebody who balanced her two loves, painting and music. And I remember reading her talk about her writing once, that some teacher basically just told her to paint with words. As a kid, that really resonated with me. 

MN: In my songwriting career, my songwriting studies, I think I really started taking it seriously when I was in art school. Those disciplines do exist under the same umbrella for me, as a creative person.

MN: I do a lot of painting and drawing. I have the work on my website. I have an interest in figurative work, like figurative art, but then it's also all over the place. I have this bleak landscape series, things like that, but I do paint and draw every day. I take photos. I had a big interest in filmmaking, but I had to stop myself—I was getting really sucked into stop motion animation. It’s so fun, but also so time consuming that I worried that everything else would disappear if I really went for it.

MN: Yeah the “All the Colors of the Dark” video is kind of both stop motion and live motion. That took forever. I mean, every little thing, you know, every movement of an inanimate object takes a hundred pictures of it moving just a little to make it move in the end. It was fun. It was kind of magical, and I'd like to do another one sometime now that the computers have maybe made the process a little easier. It makes me like things that take time more. If that makes sense.

MN: Maybe not like a film film. Maybe more short little music videos. I would love for like, a director to say, Hey, write a song for this scene or something. Or how some composers will like, get the movie and then write music to it? A movie. That seems like the ultimate fun thing to do.

MN: Oh, wow. I love that. I love that movie and the soundtrack. Paris, Texas (1984) is my favorite soundtrack. I think. Yeah. Or one of them.

MN: Maybe The Wizard of Oz (1939)? That'd have been the first musical movie I probably watched. And when that song starts, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, it exists in a realm all its own, apart from the movie a little.

MN: I love The Wizard of Oz. I love Oz, like the mythology of it. Speaking of animation, have you seen Return to Oz (1985)?

MN: It's one of my favorite movies. It's kind of like, not great. I mean, it has so much charm and Fairuza Balk from The Craft (1996), she plays young Dorothy. That movie has like, haunted me since I've seen it. It's really scary.

MN: Yeah, I think I saw it on TV. I don't remember when I saw it but I remember being really freaked out by what happens to Oz in it. I don't want to ruin it for you. I love it. And there’s this amazing claymation.

MN: Yeah, my parents are pretty cool. And my mom's an artist, a painter. My brother’s two years older than me, and he went to film school. He's a writer, a novelist now, but back then he wanted to make movies, so he'd come home and always say, You need to watch this. He was like the cool older brother, like that scene from Almost Famous (2000) where Zooey Deschanel's character gives young William, like, the keys to coolness. It was kind of like that a little. 

MN: When I was in Boston, I think that New England—or at least what New England used to be in the winters, because it doesn’t really snow as much as it used to—had an effect. Growing up with all the trees and the witchiness, I think it really did influence my visual aesthetic.

MN: I am. You know, I really exist in a kind of a bubble. Nashville hasn’t really permeated the songs, not so much. I kind of just live here. I mean, I like old country music, old time music. But a lot of non-country musicians move here for the cost of living, things like that. Because the Northeast is just crazy. But we'll see. I mean, you go to a store here, you hear a lot of Jesus saves, a lot of, Y'all have a blessed day. And you hear that stuff enough, it does start to sink in somewhat too. I don't think I've got a Southern accent yet.

MN: I don’t really remember learning. I think I just always could sing. According to my dad, at least, I mean, I remember singing from a very early age. But the craft of singing, of any musical instrument, is a lifelong process. It’s like anything else, you get better, you go through phases. I wrote a few records in high school that were like, pretty bad, in my humble opinion. Some of my early records, I look back on now with a really different eye. Or ear.

MN: I mean, yeah, I think all artists suffer from genre pigeonholing and things like that. I try to keep my head down and keep changing and evolving. Critics are tough, some reviewers are better than others. I do think one great thing about the internet these days is that people seem to make up their own minds more so than in the heyday of Pitchfork, where there really was a sense of taste-making for a whole generation. 

MN: It’s like hearing an Elliot Smith song in Good Will Hunting (1997). That’s what I hope will happen with my songs. I liked him before that movie came out, saw him at this old club in Boston. And then it was just really cool to see somebody as delicate as he was, playing at the Oscars. With that white guitar.

MN: I saw that! It was so strange. I’ve definitely been in situations like that. This store in Seattle, for instance, wanted me to do this in-store show in the middle of the day. Kind of a clothing store. And I was just like, I’ll do it, but I don’t think it’s gonna….it’s kind of weird. I feel that my music is nighttime music. So broad daylight? The tension’s interesting, though.

MN: Gosh, I have so many directors. I don’t wanna say just one, but like, Terence Malick would be cool.

MN: No, I’m really the behind-the-scenes kind. I do fine now, but I had real stage fright for a while. I’m definitely happiest when I’m writing.

MN: I’m burning through all the Scorsese movies one by one right now.

MN: I’m not going in chronological order, but I just watched The Age of Innocence (1993). It’s really great, especially the last scene which is just like, heartbreakingly poignant. I’m listening to a lot of stuff too. I listen to ambient music mostly when I’m like, in the day-to-day. Harold Budd, things like that, because I have a busy mind and I can’t have lyrics going when I’m trying to write or think.