The beautiful Little Hells of Marissa Nadler

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: March 4th, 2009 | 12:55am

“I made up a song called Marriage,” Anne Sexton writes in “The Interrogation of the Man with Many Hearts.” “For years I have tied this knot in my dreams. I have walked through a door in my dreams,” she continues, her incantations building an impossible realm of perfect love. It is from this landscape that Marissa Nadler writes, and Little Hells (Kemado Records) is Nadler’s 10 postcards, each one an image of beauty and a message of haunted sorrow.

“I think of it as a collection of really hard moments in life,” Nadler says. “The protagonist is always this lonely female character,” she elaborates, referring to the character as “an Ophelia type.” Ophelia — with her columbines and pansies — is an apt comparison, given the prevalence of flower imagery in Little Hells. “When a guy gives a woman flowers, it’s kind of this cheesy symbol of romance, and so for [flowers] to trace their path from life to death was one of the symbols I had in mind for this heartbroken woman that starts off the record. I think of this lonely old crone counting the loves she’s lost.”

“Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you / for a while / from the stars / and from the sheets / and grow from the ground,” Nadler mourns in “Ghosts & Lovers” over her trademark dusty guitar. Little Hells retains Nadler’s unmistakable voice and bittersweet lyricism as well, but she has also begun adding new elements. “Mary Come Alive” even features an electronic beat, something that shocked many of her fans.

Ultimately, Nadler says, they are sympathetic to her situation. Four albums into her career and a “folk” label affixed to her music makes the 20-year-old feel pigeonholed before she has even fully spread her wings. “I don’t know where [the music] is going to go. It just really depends on the inspiration that strikes me. I don’t have a plan to start making rap records or heavy-metal records. Well … I can guarantee I probably won’t make rap records.” Otherwise, it seems all options are open for Nadler, who thrives on possibility and enjoys surprising her listeners.

For the time being, Nadler seems to be reveling in the contrast between up-tempo numbers like “Mary Come Alive” and the rollicking “River of Dirt” and the despair of the songs’ lyrics. The cheerful music paired with the sheer beauty of Nadler’s vocals confuses some listeners. “This Japanese interviewer asked me ‘why is it called Little Hells? It should be Little Heavens,’” she recalls.

Little hells, she explains, is a phrase that she remembers first emerging in the title track. It struck her as a good album title, so she “Googled ‘little hells’ to see if anybody else had a record named that, and the only thing that popped up was this geological phenomenon in Central and South America where geysers of boiling water cause earthquakes and they’re called ‘little hells.’ It’s an interesting parallel that a song was born out of this boiling rage of emotion.”

The emotion on Little Hells ranges from loss to sorrow, a narrow terrain, but one that Nadler is comfortable traversing. As a self-taught guitarist who tours independently and writes her own songs, Nadler feels she has earned the right to admit her own loneliness. “I’m unabashedly feminine in my music, dress, and vocal stylings,” she says. “And I don’t think that’s a backwards-leaning thing. It’s OK to admit that you are longing for something more. It’s kind of this post-feminist thing, where you’re able to wear lipstick and still play guitar very well.”

She pauses before adding, “It’s possible to admit in your songs that you want a man without erasing the past 40 years of the women’s rights movement.” Nadler has a predilection for this beautiful contrast in her lyrics, which can simultaneously celebrate Patti Smith’s un-canonical femininity at the same time as have a chorus that pleads “What will I do / without a man to see me through?” as on the track “The Whole is Wide.”

“I definitely feel like I have this emptiness that hasn’t been filled yet,” Nadler says. She attributes this emptiness, in part, to growing up in a culturally bland suburb of Boston that made her long for more mysterious environments. “I’ve had a whole lifetime of moments that led me to become this person that romanticizes melancholy and escapism. I developed a very active imagination for the kind of humdrum monotony of everyday life. And then my many, many failed relationships with men over the past decade have formed this fixation on loneliness.”

No wonder the flowers in Little Hells are so frequently dead or thriving only in memory. In fact, Little Hells has much in common with the flowers Ophelia delivers: rosemary for remembrance, rue for regret, pansies for thought, and the violets too withered to be in her bouquet. Fortunately, Nadler’s hallucinations are merely memories of lovers past, and her hells are not only little but beautiful as well.

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Marissa Nadler MySpace