In “To Be the Moon King,” Marissa Nadler recounts the story of the father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard (1882-1945), who invented the first liquid-fuel rocket, as he works out codes on mirrors and chases stars. It’s the middle of January, he’s looking up at space / To Saturn’s rings burning beyond the lunar plains / Chasing stars, scribbling in mirrors over town / To stick the perfect landing and break the speed of sound, sings Nadler, gravitating toward one of the character-driven narratives on her tenth album, New Radiations.
Produced by Nadler and recorded in Nashville, where the Washington D.C. native moved in 2020, New Radiations is knitted with a cast of escape artists, much like her previous album, The Path of the Clouds from 2021, which introduced different ghosts from the past, from hijacker D.B. Cooper, who disappeared into the thin air jumping from a plane in 1971 and Alcatraz escapees in “Well, Sometimes You Just Can’t Stay.”
Moved by Nadler’s darker folk, New Radiations offers some mytifying renderings of “escapism, isolation, and solitude,” sketched within themes of time and space and other dimensions, from the opening “It Hits Harder” and a getaway flight from love—I will fly around the world just to forget you / Try not to hit the mountains as I pass through / Blinded by sandstorms, no sight of the land below / My little Cessna’s due west, and I had to go.
“When I was recording it [‘New Radiations’], I realized how much of the record happened in the sky or in outer space,” says Nadler. “It’s kind of a reflection of my life, in a way. I don’t live alone. I have a partner, but I don’t really go out, and my world is so much in my head that a lot of these songs are creative journeys.”
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Inspired by another cosmic true story, “Weightless Above the Water” follows the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, and Nadler references rockets and planes, peering into the core of another on “Light Years,” a more universal song linked to love.
“As a writer, I try to be as unpretentious as I can, so that’s a song about fated love and falling out of love with somebody,” she says. “Someone asked me if the song [‘Light Years’] was about Superman, which I found interesting … hypnotizing her with X-rays. There’s a lot of hyperbole in that song. You can’t see light years inside of somebody, but I wanted to hint at the immensity of that feeling of falling in love.”
Like “Light Years,” Nadler’s “You Called Her Camellia” is another “heartbreak” song, and was inspired by a neighbor’s father, who was once called the “King of Dahlias” and a faded love.
“I was imagining this man toiling away in the land, lamenting his lost love,” says Nadler. “It’s a song about him never moving forward, or getting over the memory of Camellia, and the chorus, ‘This wasn’t the deal,’ it’s the risk we all take when loving somebody or something, and losing it.”
Psychic vibrations and new radiations have taken their toll on me, croons Nadler on the title track, before meeting another otherworldly being, an angel, hovering above a disturbing predicament on “Hatchet Man,” and the closing, “Sad Satellite,” sends another goodbye, traveling through time.
“I like to write in manic spurts rather than just taking things left over,” says Nadler during a video interview from the room where she wrote the songs for New Radiations. “These songs represent a different part of my inner world and life.”
Oftentimes, the connections between the songs, says Nadler, are something that doesn’t reveal itself at first, citing the opening two tracks, “It Hits Harder,” which starts with a character flying a Cessna above the earth, and the second song, “Bad Dream Summertime,” opening with an unknown crash, perhaps the aircraft from the previous song.
“I hadn’t intended on that juxtaposition,” says Nadler, “but it was interesting how when you put two songs together, or two shapes on a painting, that they can change what they mean when juxtaposed by something different.”
A play off of Lou Reed’s 1984 album New Sensations, Nadler’s New Radiations also comes with a shift in subjects. “There’s a little bit of it’s a different type of writing on this record than some of my earlier works, in that a lot of the characters, they’re not tragic figures,” shares Nadler. “They’re empowered figures, either making a clean getaway, like in ‘Hatchet Man,’ or breaking grounds with inventions, or being the first woman to go into space. So it’s less fatalistic in that way.”
More than two decades since releasing her debut Ballads of Living and Dying (2004), Nadler has noticed the evolution in the structure of her songwriting. “My writing style has started to incorporate more interesting song structures than just verse, chorus, verse, chorus,” says Nadler. “The first record was straight across the board, while a lot of these new songs have strong bridges and pre-choruses. As a songwriter, I do think about structure as much as the lyrics.”
She continues, “In the earlier work, I had very little life experience, so it is very much like a fantasy world that I created. It was very literary. It was very bookish.”
Back then, Nadler pilfered lines from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s early 1930s poem, “No Hay Olvido” (“There Is No Forgetting”) on her “Hay Tantos Muertos” (“There are So Many Dead People”), paid homage to Virginia Woolf with “Virginia,” and even revisited Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabelle Lee.”
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had more personal experiences to write more authentic, emotionally affecting songs from that perspective,” says Nadler. “And going back to the theme of space and escapism, I feel like all those sub-themes fit in there, whether it’s love or just rediscovering things again.”
New Radiations is further validation of Nadler’s autonomy as an artist. “I’m a very hardcore independent artist, so all the final shots come from me, which I take great pride in at this point, because I produced this record myself,” says Nadler.
“I’m making very slow art in a fast world,” she adds, “and this is a record that, if people listen to a second and third time, reveals itself.”
Photos: Ebru Yildiz
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