Through music, she builds her own myth

It's easy to get the wrong idea about Marissa Nadler. In fact, she almost encourages it.

On her upcoming album, ``Bird on the Water," she introduces herself as the ultimate seductress: ``So do you know I'm a dancer now/ With red painted lips and a Jezebel frown/ So have you heard I'm a singer now/ With reliquary eyes and a diadem crown," she sings on ``Diamond Heart." Later, she confesses, ``I had a man in every town/ But thought of you each time I tore off my gown."

And that, in just one song, taps the essence of Marissa Nadler, a singer-songwriter whose biography seemingly belies her music's aesthetic. She grew up in Needham, yet her songs suggest she might have just wandered in from the Scottish countryside, all doe eyes and long raven hair. She's a trained painter with degrees in illustration and art education from Rhode Island School of Design, yet music comes to her intuitively and completely naturally. She's self-taught on the guitar, banjo, and ukulele. And her voice? We'll get to that later. It merits its own story.

``I think based on my music people expect me to be very witchy, like I fly in on a broomstick or something," Nadler says over dinner in Providence, where she plays a show at AS220 tonight. ``I think it's funny up to a point. I'm cognizant of the image I portray, and I like there to be a unity between the visual realm and the musical realm. You know, like the Cure and Stevie Nicks had."

Nadler is game to play her own mythmaker. She's rarely dressed in something besides her unofficial uniform: snug black dress, oversize sunglasses concealing heavy eye makeup, and bright red lipstick illuminating alabaster skin. And when Shakira's booty-shaking ``Hips Don't Lie" comes on the radio during an interview, she says, ``I love this song." Brief pause. ``Does that surprise you?"

Even if it doesn't, secretly Nadler expects that it will. She's used to fans equating her with the beguiling songstress who sings about lords and maidens, coffins and gravestones, and recurring characters named Mayflower May and John Lee. She remembers a fan in France who plied her with chocolates after her show, only to be dismayed that she was not the siren he had heard on her albums. She adopts a faux French accent: ``Oh, I thought you would be more ethereal in person," she remembers him saying.

Yes, there's Marissa Nadler the goth goddess, but there's also the 25-year-old woman who worked in Harlem for a year teaching art to elementary school kids. After a year mostly on the road touring with the likes of Jose Gonzalez, Jana Hunter, and Mi and L'au, Nadler moved back to Providence in June.

Her fans, from indie rockers to 20-something hipsters who fawn over her in MySpace testimonials, have been eager to embrace her myth. They post notes saying: ``Listening to you is like listening to heaven." She has a voice that, in mythological times, could have lured men to their deaths at sea, an intoxicating soprano drenched in gauzy reverb that hits bell-clear heights, lingers, and tapers off like rings of smoke. Hardly anyone considers Nadler a folk musician.

``Well, I'm not really a folk singer," Nadler offers. ``The only thing making my music folk is the fact that I play an acoustic guitar. If you're talking about the Carter Family or Joni Mitchell, then yeah, call me folk. But I think of my music as a collection of atmospheric songs."

She's become a finger-picking virtuoso in the John Fahey vein, having started playing the guitar at 15. But it was originally her big brother, Stuart, now an aspiring writer, who was the musician in the family; she was known as the painter. (Her parents, Pamela and Richard Nadler, still live in Needham.) Once Stuart left for college, Nadler devoted herself to becoming a real guitarist.

``I always felt a need to develop an imagination because I was always bored with my life," she says.

Her imagination has been fired up since she was a kid who used to draw a lot. By 14, she was making costumes for her brother's jam band, Strawberry Hill. Then she moved on to painting, which she excelled at in high school and at RISD. But when she realized her hobby had become something else, something academic and critiqued, she lost her drive for it. That's when music came into play.

Death is one of Nadler's central narrative threads, but her songs are rarely, if ever, about the person who has passed away. Nadler is more concerned with the those left behind. ``Box of Cedar," one of her more popular songs, tells the story of an Irish widow who's mourning the loss of her husband. But first she remembers what was so great about him. It's all here: sex (``Six fine times I felt my knees/ Buckle to your sweet release"), longing (``Five times tried to conjure you/ Another letter or a note or clue"), and the eventual devastation (``I'm gonna tell everybody I know/ That I'm glad to see you/ Even though you're coming home/ In a box of cedar").

``Bird on the Water" (a coy reference to Leonard Cohen's ``Bird on a Wire"), due early next year on her new label, Peace Frog, takes more of an introspective direction. For starters, she's finally writing from her own perspective, as opposed to the third-person voice she previously used to avoid the confessional songwriting she dislikes.

``Sylvia," one of the new songs, marks a breakthrough for Nadler. It's an homage to women artists who have inspired her. Sylvia is Sylvia Plath, but she's also shades of Virginia Woolf (``the water is your friend . . . down, down, down you go," Nadler sings), Diane Arbus, and Nadler herself.

Lately, she's been critical of her first two albums. As acclaimed as they were, Nadler feels like she has moved on. They both conjure a very distinct mood, from the Mazzy Star-like ``spacey downer folk" of her debut, ``Ballads of Living and Dying," to the medieval aggression (and tubular bells) of its follow-up, last year's ``The Saga of Mayflower May."

Some of her latest songs, which she plans to release under a side project called Ivy and the Clovers, are jangly, dream-pop ruminations on heartache, but infused with Beatles and Elliott Smith sensibilities. ``Daisy and Violet" is a stunner, a carefully researched account of the tragic story of real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. You can hear it at www.myspace.com/songsoftheend.

Greg Weeks, of the band Espers, which is opening for Vashti Bunyan tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts, produced and played some instruments on Nadler's new album.

``Working with her was really easy because she's so good at what she does," he says. ``She maybe tends to overthink a lot in her personal life, but creatively she doesn't spend time thinking about the artistic process. She just does it, and really well, with obvious skill and ability."

Nadler acknowledges that outside of music, her life isn't as controlled and serene as her music would imply.

``I've never been in search of fame. It's more a search to calm my spirit because I have a really restless soul," she says. ``I can be really nervous and anxious and neurotic, but I think I use art as a coping mechanism. It's like my medicine."

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.

Marissa Nadler plays at AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence, tonight at 9. Tickets $6. Call 401-831-9327.