Nadia Marie
The twisting, fog-shrouded road to Nadia Marie’s autobiographical debut EP, Weekday Weekend, is the stuff of chilling memoirs and avant-garde art films—the EP it birthed an affecting mini epic of minimalist bedroom-recorded indie- and electro-pop inspired by a split-second decision, a terrible accident and a life forever changed.
Several years ago, while attending college for sculpture and fronting Atlanta art-punk band Curio Museum, Nadia Marie was riding her bike home from class when a pedestrian ran out in front of the car she was following. The driver slammed on the brakes, and Nadia instinctively swerved to avoid a crash. Her bike clipped the curb and she went flying through the air, striking her head upon impact. Dazed and bleeding but unaware of the seriousness of her injury, she walked away from the scene without seeking medical attention.
The resulting brain trauma led to a state of intense amnesia, ultimately wiping out three years of Nadia’s memory, the two years that led up to the accident, and the year that followed. Anyone she’d met during that time was now a stranger—acquaintances, new friends, her boyfriend. Random parts of her distant past were also erased from her memory banks, while her ability to create new memories was severely impaired. At first she could only recall what happened a few minutes prior, then, over time, an hour, a day, a week, a month until, finally, she could store new memories at a more-or-less normal clip. This whole recovery process played out over a confusing and psychologically draining year of bedrest. And there were other changes, too, unexpected changes her friends and family noticed in her personality and tastes.
“There was so much of me that didn’t come back, so much of me that I couldn’t ever find again,” Nadia says. “I had no idea how to sculpt anymore. It was just gone. None of my clothing felt like it was mine. I didn’t like spicy food before, and now I’m obsessed with it. I had to relearn how to speak, and my speech patterns have been different since the accident. It felt like being Parent Trapped. I’m definitely not who I was, and I’m not really sure how I know that. There are all these little things in your brain that can be altered that you don’t think about until those connections are gone and rewired in a totally different way.”
The one thing that offered a trail of breadcrumbs to her past—that bridged the gap between the delicate folds of her lost identity and the new person she’d become after emerging from the cocoon of amnesia—was her ability to create music. Weekday Weekend, recorded by Nadia Marie in her recovery bed using nothing but an iPad, Garageband and a pair of Apple headphones, is a document of this valiant excavation of the self.
“I was literally in bed working on these songs, just banging away on a computer keyboard in my underwear,” Nadia says. “I was working so hard on them it pushed my recovery back. My obsession with writing and recording them, the level of concentration it took—I was supposed to be resting, but I was fixated. The songs were pulling me.”
“I like how DIY and intimate each track sounds,” she continues. “It really reflected my bedroom-bound state. But they also have this texture that sounds like the digital era we’re living in—there’s something disconnected about them. I’m really into exploring how that plays into amnesia and a sense of self and space. With “Weekday Weekend,” there’s this part that loops for a really long time, and I didn’t realize at the time because my memory was so short. I love this because it’s subconsciously conceptual—that’s what it’s like to have amnesia. It’s just like a weird looping nightmare, but sweet sounding.”
While she recorded and mixed most of the EP on her own, writing all the music and playing all the parts, on a pair of tracks—“Two Things” and “Superstition”—Nadia Marie enlisted the help of friend and producer Mark Crowley, who has since been tapped by Moog to help create their new line of synthesizers. “I’ve never been more musically in tune or compatible with someone,” Nadia says. “Mark heard exactly what I was going for. I would sing a capella without any click track or music, and he would somehow build around it in a way that worked. I hummed a lot of instrumental parts to him, how I wanted them to go, but he pushed things so much further and was able to build the songs almost out of thin air. He’s honestly a musical genius.”
While it contains multitudes, at its core, Weekday Weekend has been a vehicle for Nadia Marie to rediscover her elusive past while awash in the tides of her new identity. It’s about coming to terms with a loss of self, overcoming circumstances beyond your control, and staring down the blank-slate possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps nothing represents the promise and terror of this better than the new video for the EP’s title track, a short horror film conceptualized, choreographed and directed by Nadia herself. In four-and-a-half hypnotic minutes, it sums up her debut release, cycling through the totality of her experience in a series of gorgeous and disorienting visuals that play out across a dreary, wooded Southern landscape as she grapples with love, fear, trust, madness and truth.
Nadia Marie’s Weekday Weekend is out now.