Lynchian Heartache In "Was It A Dream" by Marissa Nadler
Drumming Upstream 8
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! If you’re just joining us, I am learning how to play every song that I’ve Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about it. Today’s song, “Was It A Dream” by folk songwriter Marissa Nadler, is the eighth song on the list.
On the evening of July 5th, 2015, the day when I Liked Marissa Nadler’s “Was It A Dream” on Spotify, the third episode of the second season of True Detective premiered on HBO. Titled “Maybe Tomorrow”, the episode begins with Detective Ray Velcoro dreaming. In his dream he speaks to his dead father in an empty bar while Conway Twitty sings “The Rose” to no one. Velcoro’s father, a cop in uniform, tells Ray that he has seen him die surrounded by red woods in a vision. Upon receiving this bad news Velcoro looks down and spots a gaping shotgun wound in his chest. Twitty’s music swells and Velcoro wakes up to learn he is still alive after being shot point blank with non-lethal shells in the previous episode’s cliffhanger.
Since July 5th 2015 was Sunday night, I would have left my shift at City Winery at 6pm with plenty of time to travel up north to watch “Maybe Tomorrow” live with a friend of mine. The two of us were co-conspirators in an act of self-delusion. We had loved True Detective’s first season and made the plan to watch season two together with every intention of loving it just as much. By July 5th our faith was three weeks thinner. Speaking only for myself, Velcoro’s fake-out undeath in “Maybe Tomorrow” was the moment when I accepted that I was not going to love True Detective season 2. From that point on the two of us endured our weekly get-togethers knowing full well we were in for a bad time. We slid from hope to disappointment, exasperation, and finally gleeful hate-watching. By the time Velcoro met his grisly wooden end the two of us were cackling like demons.
What bothered me on July 5th about the opening of of “Maybe Tomorrow” was that I knew instantly what show runner Nic Pizzolatto was trying to do. Opening your prestige mystery procedural with a dream sequence set to an old time-y song about heartbreak was not an inscrutable move in the year 2014. With Twin Peaks coming off of a Netflix residency and some high-profile indie-adjacent references in pop culture, TV critics and dedicated fans of the medium at the time would both have recognized that Pizzolatto was pursuing that most loosely-tossed of terms and highly-sought of tones. Nic Pizzolatto was trying to play the Lynchian mode.
In 2014 I was particularly eagle-eyed when it came to spotting homages and proximities to the work of David Lynch. Lured in by that same Netflix availability, I devoured Twin Peaks and waded knee-deep into the wider waters of his feature length films. When I didn’t have the time for a movie, I was lucky to have plenty of musical substitutes for the feeling I was looking for. Music plays a massive role in Lynch’s work. The hallmarks of his taste were easy to pick up on, like his fondness for old country and soul ballads or dreamily romantic notions of love and loss. This is how, on the suggestion that I review it for a friend’s blog, I knew that I would enjoy Marissa Nadler’s July.
Nadler is a singer songwriter and guitarist originally from Boston. Before she released July in 2014 Nadler already had five albums worth of acoustic songs in no small part inspired by folk and country traditions. Starting on July, Nadler’s music tilted into darker territory, shifting into minor keys1 and suspending Nadler’s already unearthly voice in reverb fit for an abandoned estate, while still retaining enough traditionalist class for me to sneak a number of her tracks onto the work playlist at City Winery. I can’t remember whether I Liked “Was It A Dream” before or after I gritted my teeth through “Maybe Tomorrow”, but the stats do not lie. I went to bed that night giving my thumbs up to Marissa Nadler and my thumbs down to True Detective. I knew then and I know now that Nadler had, intentionally or not, nailed with grace what Pizzolatto had haphazardly grazed. I knew this even before Velcoro lay dreaming in his own juices. Along with its already bloated bevy of storylines, True Detective season two cuts with frequency to a dive bar singer played by Lera Lynn. Every time Lynn’s character started strumming out Americana Gothic in soft lighting I thought to myself “why didn’t they just get Marissa Nadler?”
Before we go any further, I need to acknowledge that this question isn’t exactly fair to Nadler2. There’s a lot more to Marissa Nadler than background music for a bored 24 year old to play while sitting behind a box office daydreaming of Audrey Horne. Luckily, we’ll have another occasion in this series to talk about one of the other sides of her songwriting. For now I feel confidant in connecting “Was It A Dream” and David Lynch, in part because Nadler herself name-checked him in an interview around the time of the the song’s release and because the song’s subject matter and execution make it easy to justify the comparison. In short, by Liking the song on the same day that I saw “Maybe Tomorrow” I made the same argument then that I’d like to make today; everything True Detective sought to evoke in Ray Velcoro’s dream, its world weary severity and magical realism alike, already lived in Marissa Nadler’s “Was It A Dream”. To prove this, I’ll first compare how Nadler’s lyrics and my favorite David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive both use dreams to describe heartbreak on Side A. Then, after we dry our eyes, I’ll break down how the song’s arrangement, made in collaboration with producer Randall Dunn, helps Nadler evoke a dreamlike state musically.
Side A
“Was It A Dream”
By Marissa Nadler
July
Released on February 10th, 2014
Liked on July 5th, 2015
“Was It A Dream” is the first track on side B of July, Nadler’s sixth album and first for Sacred Bones. In an interview with Audiofemme’s Lindsey Rhodes, Nadler says that she wrote the record during and in part about a breakup that lasted from one July to another a year later. As Nadler puts it “Side A has a lot to do with the ups and downs of that relationship. And Side B has a lot to do with people in between him and… him.” Sitting at the start of side B, “Was It A Dream” would be the exact midpoint of the album’s emotional arc, though not necessarily the midpoint chronologically. In fact, the way Nadler’s lyrics deal with time is part of what reminds me so much of Mulholland Drive.
In “Was It A Dream” Nadler’s narrator has spent the last year “stumbling from room to room” hoping to wake up in the same bed as her former lover. On the other side of this heartbroken, and, given the lyrics to a few other songs on the record, likely boozy stupor, the narrator looks back on the experience and cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. Was her relationship a dream that she woke from, or was her year of stumbling a nightmare that she has only now escaped? This uncertainty renders what should be a happy ending equally ambiguous. The world is the same but it has taken a different shape.
This would be a decent summary of Mulholland Drive itself, were it not for the movie’s significantly bleaker ending. Mulholland Drive is the story of Diane Sawyer, a failed actress who hires a hitman to murder her ex, Camilla Rhodes, a much more successful actress who dumped her for a hot shot director. After ordering the hit, Diane dreams of her former lover, wakes up to learn Camilla is dead, and kills herself in a fit of guilt. A pretty simple story on paper. In practice, Diane’s dream takes up the majority of the movie while the waking segments are relegated to the final third. More importantly, the dream feels cinematically grounded and real (by Lynch’s standards), unfolding like a mystery novel. Diane’s real life on the other hand is told out of order and shot under harsher light. Instead of being “weird for weird’s sake” like many of Lynch’s detractors and even some fans claim, this bifurcated structure has a deliberate purpose. Diane’s life no longer makes sense, it’s only when she dreams she is still with Camilla that order is restored.
Nadler’s lyrics in “Was It A Dream” trace how reality feels dreamlike in the wake of a relationship lost. The setting, the “rivers and the towns”, keep changing as Nadler’s narrator tries to reorder reality, just like Diane recasts figures in her life so that she can remain with Camilla. In both cases this reworked dream world is fragile, a paper construction over a pit of despair. Throughout Mulholland Drive, Diane’s real world failures threaten to puncture the walls of her fantasy. The industry that rejected her is shown to be under the control of ominous conspiracy, and demonic faces lurk behind the sunlit parking lot of the local Winkie’s diner. Meanwhile Nadler follows up her song’s title with the possibility of “something sinister” at play. Though the song doesn’t lay all of its cards out on the table, the allusion to alcohol in the bridge makes it hard to picture this sinister presence as anything other than the bottle. The long term intoxication that Nadler describes can turn life into a hazy half-reality where the order of events, the hour of the day, and the day itself can blur into formlessness. The narrator dreams of better days because looking at her current state would be too painful, the same way that Diane imagines herself to be a talented actor to escape the lonely dead end she’s found herself in.
By spending so much time in Diane’s subconscious, Mulholland Drive makes us feel the full weight of Diane’s despair by sheer contrast alone once she wakes up. Even if our own heartache leads only us to spend our Sunday nights after work watching TV we know is awful just for the sake of company in misery, Diane’s pain is no longer something abstract that needs to be told to us, we feel it in the very experience of watching the movie. Nadler’s lyrics do their fair share of heavy lifting to put us in her phantasmic shoes, but it’s her music and Randall Dunn’s production that bring the listener all the way into her gothic Oz. Which brings us to Side B.
Side B
“Was It A Dream”
Performed by Pat Schowe
60 BPM (approx)
When my friend and editor sent me the NPR: First Listen stream of July (this was before I was “big time” enough to get actual promos for the albums I wanted to cover, so I had to rely on the advance streams of bigger websites, sad!) one of the first things that caught my eye was the name Randall Dunn. Dunn is a Seattle based producer who, prior to his work with Marissa Nadler, was most well known for producing records for much darker and weirder bands like Sunn O))) and Wolves In The Throne Room. His presence behind the boards assured me that a metal head like me wouldn’t be too far out of my dismal comfort zone. Digging deeper into July’s liner notes, I found even more familiar names. Steve Moore of the synths & drums duo Zombi provides all manner of keys across the album, and Pat Schowe, whose drumming I emulated below, also played on solo records by Neurosis bellower and guitarist Steve Von Till. Though little of July has anything in common with Two Hunters or A Sun That Never Sets, Dunn and his team bring just enough demonic drama to transform Nadler’s acoustic songs into fleshed out dreamworlds.
Two July’s later when I interviewed Marissa Nadler for Invisible Oranges about her second album with Dunn, Strangers, she told me that the two of them style their arrangements for the needs of each song and work organically rather than cerebrally. Based on this quote and my experience learning “Was It A Dream” on drums, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Nadler and Dunn started recording with a full play through by Nadler on acoustic guitar, no click, and then gradually layered other instruments around her performance. This isn’t an uncommon way to record because it is a smart way to record, especially for singer/songwriters that write on acoustic instruments. Nadler’s time on the guitar isn’t metronome perfect but it sticks consistently enough between 60 and 61 bpm to serve as a rhythmic spine for the rest of the arrangement, and with her vocals already in place it’s easier to write parts specifically to compliment the lyric. Take a listen to the string arrangement on the song’s bridge. Notice how they enter each phrase just as Nadler’s stacked harmonies are tailing off and alternate between long and short attacks to keep the pattern from getting stale. The strings are an obvious example, but every other instrument plays off of Nadler to some degree. Pat Schowe’s drums hit just behind Nadler’s guitar, letting her set the tempo and responding appropriately. Schowe’s tempo in turn pulls the rest of the band just slightly off of Nadler’s internal grid. Taken in tandem with the reverb Dunn dusts over the instruments, this delayed time makes the song feel both weightless and lumbering, an apt feeling for both the song’s dreamlike and tragic qualities.
Maybe this will be clearer if you hear how I tried to play the song.
A few notes on this performance:
Playing in Bellows for the last two years made it easy for me to get the general gist of what Schowe did on this track. The distance between the lighter touch required for the softer Bellows tunes and Schowe’s country-folk reserve isn’t that far.
I did however make a few personal changes to the part. First, lacking a tambourine, I had to insert hi-hats into the song’s second verse, which means I lost some of the delayed attack for a shorter staccato sound. Next, I added a lot more ghost notes into the song once the snare and ride cymbal enter for the guitar solo. These ghost hits on the snare help me keep my time steady in the moments between the quarter notes, and since those quarters only hit once per second there is a lot of time to fill up. Finally for the song’s bridge I decided to shift back over to the hi-hat, even though Schowe stays on the ride. This would be how I’d try and play the song in a live setting, where minor changes in dynamics like this keep the performance from getting repetitive. I also think the quicker attack of the hi-hats fits better with the pizzicato in the string section.
Finally, in my attempts to match Schowe’s behind-the-beat pulse I got a bit overzealous and fell off the rhythm for a moment in the last stretch of the bridge. I think it still works with the song, but yeah, it could have been a tighter take. Trust that it was the best of the bunch.
Now knowledgeable of the song from inside and out I can conclude that I was right in 2014 when I held this song up as the better example of Lynchian dreaminess. But does that mean I still like it as much in the present day? To find out, let’s go to the DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
There is a lot that I enjoy about Marissa Nadler’s “Was It A Dream”. The chorus is a real knockout, especially the way Nadler’s two vocal melodies weave over each other on the word “dream”. Phil Wandscher’s guitar solo is a beauty. And again, those strings in the bridge are killer. But where I was once eagle-eyed I am now glazed over. The last eight years has exposed me to so much god damn David Lynch-ish stuff in general, and spooky reverbed-out folk in particular, that the itch I wanted “Was It A Dream” to scratch has been leveled down to a rash. This isn’t Nadler’s fault at all, and when we return to her in this series we’ll have a better example of what resonates with me these days. But for now I’m going to put “Was It A Dream” above Joyce Manor’s “Constant Headache” but below the rest of the field.
“Was It A Dream” by Marissa Nadler
Thanks for reading another longer entry of Drumming Upstream. I think I can get the next entry ready next week. The next track on the list makes for a pretty good pair with today’ pick, as a contrasting version of hazy unreality. Hope you dig it, see you next week!
Part of this change might be attributable to Nadler’s experimentation with open minor tunings on her guitar, as described in this video interview.