New York singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler will be releasing her 10th album, The Path of Clouds, on October 29th, 2021. When I first heard Marissa’s 2014 release July, I knew I was hearing something really special. It’s not an easy thing to put a label on the the songs of Marissa Nadler. If I had to describe them with words, I would have to say that they are powerful pieces of music that are melancholy, gothic, psychedelic, folksy, dreamy, spacey, and sometimes unsettling. With a voice that is as delicate as a flower yet haunting enough to make you sleep with one eye opened, Marissa Nadler has carved her own place in music defying any kind of genre or tag.
The song “If I Could Breathe Underwater” was co-written with one of Marissa’s longtime friends, Mary Lattimore. Marissa had this to say about the song:
“When I wrote ‘If I Could Breathe Underwater,’ I was contemplating the possibilities of possessing various superhuman powers: teleportation, shapeshifting, energy projection,
aquatic breathing, extrasensory perception, and time travel to name a few,” says Nadler. “As a lyrical device, I married those powers with events in my life, wondering if and how they could
change the past or predict the future. I loved working on the melody for this song and bringing the choruses to their climaxes. Mary’s layered, hallucinatory shimmers really echo the netherworld of the story.”
The accompanying video, beautifully directed and edited by Jenni Hensler with cinematography by Nick Fancher, serves to create a preternatural world where Nadler changes the colors of the sky and the water, floats weightlessly through seas, and becomes one with layers of color and ink. It was shot on 16mm film (with the exception of the underwater shots). “This song took on many meanings to me and I love that about it. How beauty and tragedy collide,” says Hensler. “Dreaming of having supernatural powers to change reality and have the ability to live and breathe underwater. It could also speak to the duality of existence. That we all have inner personas or shadow selves, and how we envision those different masks we wear. I chose to make something that touched on the idea of duality and the inner persona. To connect to the two worlds.”
The Path of Clouds will be released on October 29th and Marissa Nadler will play a record release show at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on November 14th.
Pre-order the album here: https://geni.us/ThePathofTheClouds
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