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Sep 14, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Marissa Nadler is releasing a new album, The Path of the Clouds, on October 29 via Sacred Bones and Bella Union. Now she has shared its second single, “If I Could Breathe Underwater,” via a video for the song that fittingly features Nadler underwater. The song features harp playing from Mary Lattimore, a longtime friend of Nadler’s. Jenni Hensler directed the video, which was partially shot with 16mm film camera. Watch it below.

Nadler had this to say in a press release: “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. 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.”

Hensler had this to say about the video: “This song took on many meanings to me and I love that about it. How beauty and tragedy collide. 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.”

Previously Nadler shared the album’s first single, “Bessie, Did You Make It?,” via a video for it. “Bessie, Did You Make It?” was one of our Songs of the Week.

Nadler wrote and recorded the album during the pandemic and was partially inspired by binging reruns of Unsolved Mysteries as she “began to notice parallels between many of its stories and her own life,” as a press release puts it. On The Path of the Clouds she worked with various collaborators, including Mary Lattimore, Simon Raymonde (of Cocteau Twins and Lost Horizons and the head of Bella Union), multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, Jesse Chandler (Nadler’s piano teacher and a member of Mercury Rev and Midlake), Emma Ruth Rundle, and Black Mountain’s Amber Webber. Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, Battles, and Lightning Bolt) mixed the album.

Nadler’s last album was 2018’s For My Crimes.

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