Musicians - Marissa Nadler

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	Musicians - Marissa Nadler

Marissa Nadler is an American folk musician and fine artist born 5 April 1981 in Washington D.C. Growing up in Massachusetts, and coming from a creative family—"My mother was an abstract painter and very eccentric. She was a clairvoyant, I'm not sure how much I believe in that kind of thing but there was always voodoo spells going on in the house. My brother is a guitarist and a novelist, so I had a kind of Renaissance family, everybody was creative"—Nadler studied Photorealism at Rhode Island School of Design, where she became interested in old artistic techniques.

Nadler is often categorised as a member of the "New Weird America" movement, a notion she rejects: "I really dislike that whole brand of the New Weird America because I think a lot of these artists don't have anything to do with each other, except that they're from America and are playing interesting music that's not part of the mainstream. I don't think that each and every one of them deserves to be pigeonholed into a subculture. I especially feel more like a balladeer than a weird folk singer." She is also often classed as a part of the recent folk revival, another claim she rejects, stating, "My music comes much more from an Americana traditions. I really like gritty old blues singers and Country & Western. I like the British stuff, but it was never an influence of mine."

More accurate would be to describe Nadler as a balladeer with American Gothic leanings; her songs often take place in an imagined, idealistic time with a cast of characters of her own creation. Her links to American Gothic are reinforced by "Annabelle Lee", the last song on her debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, which puts the poem of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe to a musical backing. Singing in a haunting mezzo-soprano, the foundation of her songs are her delicate 12-string acoustic guitar, often accompanied by variety of instruments, ranging from banjo to tin-whistle.

Marissa Nadler released her first album, Ballads of Living and Dying, on Eclipse Records in 2004; her follow-up, The Saga of Mayflower May, was released in July 2005.

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