Marissa Nadler's Personal Best
Marissa Nadler takes time out of her New Radiations European tour to pick out five favourite cuts from her 20+ year career, and hint at what comes next.
It was the year 2003 when Marissa Nadler first emerged from a thicket of skeletal, wintering birch trees on the cover of Ballads of Living and Dying, but it could just as easily have been 1883.
Nadler’s debut album may have been recorded digitally on an eight-track recorder, in her producer’s apartment, but there’s little trace of the modern world besides across its ten songs, each fogged with echo and gothic-novelette yarns on suicide, murder, and flickers of the lost.
For a while, the art school alum from New England seemed to exist within her own poetic supernature, all antiquity, reverb, and garments of tar black. But, as her discography grew, so did her musical canvas and palette. After further breaking through with 2007’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, made with members of psych-folk collective Espers, Nadler signed to NYC-based Kemado Records for her sonically aggrandised fourth album, Little Hells, but it was not a happy marriage. The label dropped her, but not before launching the Mexican Summer imprint that took its name from one of her songs.
Disheartened, Nadler’s next move was to self-release and self-title her next album in search of a fresh start, dialling down the reverb and – leaning into her past as a teenage No Depression reader – adding pedal steel-kissed country into her already potent mix of styles. Belatedly, and not without some struggle, that fresh start turned into a fully-fledged reboot with 2014’s July, her first album to be released through her current label homes of Bella Union in Europe and Sacred Bones in North America.
“For me, July marks the return of my career, in a way,” she tells BEST FIT over video call from her home in Nashville, where she’s lived for the past 5 years. “After Little Hells, I thought about stopping for a while, even though the record got great reviews. The whole thing with being dropped from Mexican Summer was hard. But now I think of my early years as being everything up to the self-titled album and [companion piece] The Sister, and then everything from July onwards as my best, more adult work.”
Nadler’s latest album, New Radiations, is her tenth ‘official’ solo album, but her ‘unofficial’ releases – including several collections of covers, demos, and rarities – add up to almost as many. Released back in August, New Radiations arrived off the back of Nadler’s most sonically ambitious album, the Pink Floyd-indebted The Path of the Clouds (2021), but is more a reaction to than an extension of that record.
“The one thing I lamented about on the last album was that I wasn’t playing so much guitar on it, and I missed the deep-cutting simplicity and the rawness of that,” she explains. “I could absolutely picture taking these new songs and making a rock record with them, but I just didn’t want to go that way this time. It’s a quiet, slow burning, very meditative kind of record. It’s not one that necessarily hits you right away, but some of my favourite records of all time are ones that took me some time to really get to know them.”
Those favourites include early discography entries from Leonard Cohen and Elliott Smith, plus Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Sybille Baier’s one-and-only album, to name just a few of Nadler’s core musical texts. Though it most rewards careful attention, the self-produced New Radiations isn’t short of catchy melodies, and Nadler is rightfully proud of the harmony arrangements. “It’s interesting to put out an album like this,” she says. “The world moves on so fast these days, but art lasts forever and people will discover things in their own time.”
Nadler describes New Radiations as mostly comprising songs about escape or travel in general. We start out in the cockpit of a Cessna with a lonesome pilot (“It Hits Harder”) but later come spaceships and notions of travel through time, plus “a lot of surreal imagery and death,” as one might expect. This is a Marissa Nadler album, after all.
“The world moves on so fast these days, but art lasts forever and people will discover things in their own time.”
Partly inspired by leaving her old life, and ex-husband, behind to relocate to Nashville, New Radiations is a reckoning with all the change she’s faced and the finality of so much of that change. “I’ve always been attracted to heartbreak in my writing, but the songs on this album I think are slightly different,” she says. “They’re more empowering, lyrically, telling the stories of these solitary characters on their own journeys of trying to move on from something. I really enjoyed exploring quite personal themes but through different lenses, which I think allowed for detaching from reality and just letting all this other visual imagery into the songs.”
She may still favour monochrome (and has found the perfect foil for that in photographer Ebru Yıldız), but there’s no doubt Nadler has come a terrifically long way since her college-age debut, both as a songwriter and as a producer, not forcing change but pursuing it organically and learning from the path. When it came to choosing the five songs she considers her personal best, Nadler zoomed in on those that signpost her overall journey, from the debut to the now. But first she wants to point to what comes next: a band project with her closest collaborator Milky Burgess (who she’s currently on tour with as a duo) and former Tangerine Dream member turned solo artist and film composer Paul Haslinger.
“The band is called Ophir, which is a reference to a mythical city of gold but also has a lot of other meanings,” she explains, describing how Haslinger got in touch with her through Instagram (“of all places”) to propose the project. The songs will all be covers, she says, but mostly deeper cuts than people might expect and given a “very cinematic, spacey” treatment. “It’s really different, and huge sounding,” she adds. “We’re just trying to decide on the final mixes, but I can say that there’s a Billie Holiday song on there, and some Doc Watson stuff.”
“I just want to keep going and going,” she says excitedly when we’re done. “I hope I’ll have 20 records out by the time I’m 50, or something.” Watch this space for round two in 2031, then.
"Fifty Five Falls" (2004)
MARISSA NADLER: Ballads of Living and Dying is always going to be very special to me, because it was my first record. I’m happy that it still stands up for me, and I like that it’s really out-there from the beginning. It shows just how long I’ve been doing this.
I chose “Fifty Five Falls” as it’s the first song on the record, and likely to be the first song that most people heard of mine. The album came out on a really small label, so it was kind of surprising that it got noticed in that way that it did. I was writing quite surreal songs back then and I still think this one is pretty odd. Lyrically, it’s a tender song about death, but I’m also attached to its sonic qualities and how it set the groundwork for my later work. It’s such a dreamy song.
I recorded the album with Myles Baer, and I remember him telling me “I don’t think anybody’s gonna be into this kind of music.” Then, of course, the next year psych-folk blew up, which was a little strange for me and I still don’t put myself in that scene. I think I’ve always been a little darker, but I did get kind of lucky with the timing of it all.
I was probably a junior in college when I wrote “Fifty Five Falls” and the other songs from that record. I was obsessed with everything old and antiquated, so I wrote it on a typewriter. I have fond memories of working really hard on the lyrics and the song structures. There’s something so pure about making your first record, because you don’t think anybody’s really going to hear it. It’s something special just for you. To be honest, I don’t know what I expected from it, but I definitely didn’t expect to go and have a music career.
Listening to “Fifty Five Falls” now, it’s interesting how my voice is kind of lower on that song, and I’m singing almost like a British person. I’d been listening to a lot of Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs, so I think that must have rubbed off on some of my pronunciations. I was playing open mic nights in bars at the time, in Rhode Island, and even back then there were all these dudes telling me I used too much reverb on my voice, but I just told them that I didn’t agree. I’m glad I didn’t listen to them and stuck with my aesthetic choices.
I don’t use as much reverb as I used to, or at least not such a cloudy one, but that whole time period comes back to me when back to me when I listen to this song. I remember what it’s like to be young and making art just for the sake of it. I’m proud of how eccentric it is. I still play “Fifty Five Falls” live, but it’s changed a lot over the years. I was really into open tunings at the time, having discovered the music of John Fahey and some of Joni’s Mitchell’s open tunings. I’d also just gotten my Martin 12-string guitar, and I remember being excited about the little riff on this song. I still like to play it because it has this cool drone to it.
BEST FIT: It’s lovely to see it on the list. A lot of artists I speak to say they can’t listen to their first album at all because they hadn’t found their full voice or they think they sound like a baby.
I think I sound like a baby on my fourth album, Little Hells, whereas on Ballads I feel like I sound more like an old lady.
Actually, I didn’t pick anything off my second album [The Saga of Mayflower May] because I don’t like the way my voice sounds on it. I was singing almost in an operatic way, using a lot of vibrato. I think I probably absorbed that from some of the people I was hanging out with at the time. These days I can listen to the album and still appreciate it for what it is, but it does seem a little less natural.
"Firecrackers" (2014)
MARISSA NADLER: When I started working on July, my writing changed into something that felt incredibly confessional, in a way that it had never been before. It just felt like the songs needed to come out that way. It was a traumatic period in my life, with my partner and I breaking up and then getting back together. But I think the fact that July was quite bare and emotionally vulnerable and exposing is why people seemed to connect with it so much. Also, the production is really tasty. Randall Dunn did a great job.
I remember feeling excited when I wrote the melody to “Firecrackers”. I knew it was hooky, and it’s one of the first songs I ever wrote where it starts with the chorus. It’s different in that way. I was also really excited about the stacked vocal harmonies, which started to play a bigger role in my music from July onwards. I could have picked “Drive” from this record, too. I feel similarly about that one. Some days I like “Drive” better, but for some reason I think the melody on “Firecrackers” is more compelling. It’s quite swingy and sounds kind of classic. I also like the pedal steel guitar because it’s not a modern version of that sound but more old-fashioned, in a Roy Orbison or Everly Brothers kind of way.
For me, July symbolises sticking with something. I’d gone back to teaching and was feeling totally jaded with the music industry – and I still am, to be honest – but I missed putting out music. I only wanted to do it for absolutely the right reasons, though. I remember I put out a song about a year before July came out – it was a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Save Me a Place” – and people actually wrote about it. I was like, ‘Wow, people do still care.’ That was more than a decade ago now. I remember having this acute feeling that as you get older and put out more and more records, it’s tough to keep people engaged. But July proved me wrong and regenerated my career and my creative drive.
BEST FIT: I remember the first time I listened to this song, it kind of stopped me in my tracks. I also really love the video where there’s all this symbolism of destruction in reverse. It’s really haunting.
It’s been so long since I’ve seen that. My ex and I had a really creative thing going on there for a while. It’s actually really interesting to be talking about that record and the new one together, because now it’s more than 10 years later and New Radiations is like, ‘So, you’re in a rocketship trying to forget your past.’
"Said Goodbye to That Car" (2018)
MARISSA NADLER: I picked this song for the songwriting, not necessarily the production, though I like the production on the record just fine. I was really proud of the odometer chorus, because as well as being a songwriter I’m also kind of a nerd. I was so excited when the odometer reading matched with the rhythm and the meter of the song, because the car I’m singing about was with me throughout the whole relationship with my ex. It's interesting how cars can signify certain periods of our lives, especially here in the US where everyone drives everywhere.
Like the songs on July, and on the album that came after that, Strangers, this record is quite autobiographical, but in a different way. There really was a bullet that went through the car roof, just like in the lyrics. I love Janel Leppin’s string arrangement on this song. It’s very Beatles-y. It’s a shame that I’ve never really been able to perfect this song live, because of all the vocal layers. That’s something I’ve really been trying to figure out lately, how to bring in that luscious vocal sound. I think the real beauty of this song is the part where it goes “And the sky turned black” and there are all these layers of vocals as it comes up.
For My Crimes was a very California record. It was so cool to get Angel Olsen, Sharon van Etten, Kristin Kontrol, Mary Lattimore, and all these friends of mine to come and sing on it, because they were all living in LA at the time. It’s just me singing on “Said Goodbye to That Car”, but the record in general was really special in how collaborative it was. I always think of Kristin’s harmony on “Blue Vapor” because I would never have sung it like that in a million years and I loved it immediately, especially the way it interacts with the saxophone at the end.
I feel like this song’s place in this list is kind of a tie with “All the Colors of the Dark”, which is really a favourite song of mine. Although, if I did it over, I’d probably take the drums out. I always heard it more like a Townes van Zandt song, but once you put the drums on it the song feels very rigid in a way. But I still really like the recording. It’s got a music box feeling to it. So, on another day, I could have picked that song over “Said Goodbye to That Car” – you can put that in the piece if you want.
BEST FIT: I will, because the Strangers album deserves some love too.
Yeah, this was really hard! I feel like Strangers and July really go together, not just because they were both produced by Randall. They are from a similar era, in many ways, although Strangers is not as confessional. There’s more surrealist writing on there. I was using the cut-up method to get into a lot of lyrical experiments to arrive at songs like “Divers of the Dust”, which was really fun.
I have a lot more demos from that era that I wish I’d pushed a little harder for. It’s interesting now that I produce my own records and I don’t have a manager, I can really see how a manager often comes in, tells you which songs they like, and even which songs to throw off the record. One song that was meant to be on the record, “I Remember the Touch of Your Hands”, has out-streamed any of the other tracks after I put it out on the Bury Your Name cassette. So, it’s just so nice to now have complete autonomy over everything and no one to meld my young, innocent brain with their tastes [laughs].
You’re in quite an interesting position of being on two separate labels and still maintaining total artistic control.
Yeah, I’m really lucky. Both Sacred Bones and Bella Union are very artist-friendly, and I really do appreciate that because I once had a contract, in a previous era, that my records should have at least three songs with drums. Shit like that is so ridiculous for somebody like me, so I’m glad that I don’t get that anymore.
It’s funny, because I remember speaking to you about Little Hells a while after it came out and you were really not happy about the drums.
Yeah, that record is just tarnished for me. I think, if anything, that whole experience has made me a better writer, and a tougher person too. And, as I said earlier, I don’t love my voice on it. My voice just became better and mature as I grew more confident, which, again, is something that I feel happened from July onwards.
Thinking about Joni Mitchell, who is a big influence of mine, you notice that when you listen to her early records and trace the trajectory of her voice through time, she starts off so romantic and idealistic but on the later stuff she can be so jaded. She’s dark, she’s sad, and she’s lived all this life. When you’re young and you haven’t experienced a lot, it’s easy to just write fantasy songs. I didn’t have a lot of love affairs as a young person. I was the art room girl, you know? I didn’t go on dates or go to parties in high school.
Going back to my second album, The Saga of Mayflower May, it’s so out-there. Like, what am I talking about?! I’d experienced my first real heartbreak by then, but I went so over the top with it. By the time I got to albums like July and For My Crimes, I actually had some real-life experience under my belt and I think that’s so helpful for the writing process. I love the therapeutic process of making stuff, and I look back fondly on having that time of recreating myself. I have so many friends who have given up music, who’ve stopped making it for a variety of reasons, and I’d always wonder ‘How could they?’ But at the same time I’d think, ‘Oh, well, maybe I should too.’ So, again, it just shows that if you stick at something even when you’re about ready to give up, it can turn out to be really fruitful.
"Bessie, Did You Make It?" (2021)
MARISSA NADLER: I’m really proud of the Path of the Clouds record.
“Bessie, Did You Make It?” is such an interesting song, because it is a personal song but it’s also a murder balled. Or maybe it’s not a murder ballad because we really don’t know what happened with the real-life case. I wrote this song after a period of writer’s block, trying to pull inspiration from everything around me. One day I was watching the Unsolved Mysteries episode about Glen and Bessie Hyde and started to take notes. Afterwards I looked them up and the song really wrote itself from there, lyrically.
I was really captivated by the idea that they might not have died, or she might have gotten away from him, but I did take some liberties with the story. I wanted to, again, break with the traditional murder ballad, which is a woe-is-me women, lady-in-the-lake kind of thing. Instead, it became a song about empowerment and mystery. I’ve always been struck by the story of the duchess Anastasia who was rumoured to have survived the Russian Revolution, and other stories that have a similar theme of disappearance and recreation. So, I like to think that Bessie Hyde did make it.
Another reason I chose this song is that I think it’s really pretty, because of all the musicians who collaborated with me on it. I wrote to all these people I know and they sent me stuff back, and it became a sort of musical version of the exquisite corpse drawing game. The song was pretty much all written, with the vocal and the guitar and the harmonies in place before I sent it around, and it came back with all this stuff that I never would have thought of sonically myself.
It is definitely easier to write about real-life stories. If you think of songs like Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and “Joey”, both from his album Desire, they're both biographical songs that are so rich with detail. I wanted to write songs that were coming from that kind of tradition, where there’s so much emphasis on loving the language used to tell these biographical stories.
BEST FIT: I wonder what motivated that elderly woman to claim she was Bessie and that she’d murdered Glen, only to completely deny that she ever said such a thing.
Yeah, and that was in 1971, so way before all these true crime shows we have now, which does make you think. Well, I had a lot of fun working with this story and the others on the record. There are some personal songs, like “Lemon Queen”, “Storm”, and “From Vapor to Stardust”, but I’d say about three quarters of the songs are based on true stories, like the Alcatraz escapees on “Well, Sometimes You Just Can’t Stay”. I went in more or less a polar opposite direction with New Radiations, with the exception of the song “Hatchet Man”. So, while some of the songs from the new album may be inspired by real people, they are very personal. I am putting myself in each character, even the Moon King, because if I were to just make record after record of topical songs, I’m not sure that would be as interesting.
You’ve talked before about how your work as a teacher and your visual art practice has helped you to source a lot of ideas from an ever-growing collection of reference materials. Would you say that has become an integral part of your process since then?
Yeah, it has. Thinking about New Radiations, for example, I have a lot of reference books about astronomy, the cosmos, and all sorts of science-y stuff, and I had some of those books on my desk when searching for imagery for these songs, which I would say is the most time-travelling of my records. It moves through a lot of different time periods.
I do think being a visual artist helps my writing quite a bit. I remember reading a magazine interview with Joni Mitchell, when I was a teenager, and being really struck by what she was saying about the duality of being both a visual artist and a musician. It was the first time I’d ever seen somebody talk about those two things in terms of how they informed each other. It sounds a bit cheesy, but she said in the interview that one of her teachers told her to “paint with words,” and that’s how I’ve tried to write ever since. When I write, I really want to visualise the whole scene and then try to give details as if I had to paint it, which I think makes it more visceral.
"Smoke Screen Selene" (2025)
BEST FIT: I can’t help but feel that the title of this song is quintessentially Marissa.
MARISSA NADLER: [laughs] Yeah, I realised recently just how many songs about female characters with weird epithets I've created and decided to make a book of illustrations of them. There's so many, dating all the way back to the first album. I don’t know why. I was influenced by a lot of the classic songwriters, like Bob Dylan, who wrote songs like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, so these are my versions of that kind of writing. There are so many of them: “Dead City Emily”, “Mary Come Alive”, “Janie In Love”…
Don’t forget “Flora Barone, Queen of the Vaudeville Throne”
There’s, like, 50 of them. I made a list, and I think it would make a really cool book. My only issue is, do I want to put a face to any of these women? Because once you put an image with something, that’s how people perceive it. Maybe I could just leave them quite abstract. It’s one of the long-term projects that I’m thinking of. Maybe a fun little merch table thing.
Anyway, I chose “Smoke Screen Selene” because it wasn't one of the singles from the album. To be honest, I hate picking singles for records. It’s hard to pick something knowing that’s what everybody is going to hear. While I do really love the song “New Radiations”, which was the first single, I do prefer my guitar playing when it’s picked, like on this song, which has a really sinister, creepy riff. I also really like that it has this cool, strong bridge at the end. Sonically, I love the effects we used here. It makes the song feel so smokey and strange, which is pretty representative of my vibe I guess.
It does sounds very classically you, but also quite different at the same time. I like that you’re contrasting these very specific verses with a much more universally relatable sentiment in the chorus.
Yeah, I've noticed that a lot. I’ve been a student of songwriting, in a way. Usually it's the chorus that is the universal statement. Generally speaking, not always, but I always try to include a strong one-liner. One that comes to mind off the new record is “You called her Camellia / This wasn’t the deal, her / Fading away.” I’m really happy with that one.
Another reason I picked “Smoke Screen Selene” is that, when the album came out in August, I had some sweet messages from friends saying that they loved this song. I was like, “Well, I really love it too.” It’s rarely the singles are my favourites. I know I chose “Bessie, Did You Make It?” for this list, but I also really love “Lemon Queen”, which is the last track on Path of the Clouds. I could have chosen “Was it a Dream” from July, though “Dead City Emily” was the lead single from that album and that song is a favourite of mine, too
Part of me wishes that we didn’t have to release any singles at all, and that people could just make their minds up based on listening to the record in full. I think that’s particularly with New Radiations, because it was very much made to be listened to as a whole piece. It’s hard to pick just one song out of context.
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