Guillermo CastroIf you’ve read anything about Nadia Marie, then you’ve probably heard about the accident. How it broke her body and erased her identity. How it stole her past and left her fumbling for a way forward. Brain trauma would eventually wipe away three years of her life, the first of which Marie spent bedridden, lost in the fog of acute amnesia. It was a period not only of severe pain and confusion but, as we’ll soon discover, it was also one of heartbreaking deceit and betrayal.
For a long time, Marie was consumed by bitterness and frustration. Without any memory of her former self, there was nothing to return to or build upon, no routines to keep her grounded. Marie would interrogate her friends about who she was, about her dreams, loves, and fears. So little of what they told her felt familiar.
Worse still, the creative endeavors that had once consumed her life had also faded. Prior to the accident, Marie was an aspiring sculptor and harpist who spent most of her days composing music or crafting hyper-realistic figurative sculptures. But try as she might, she could no longer summon the passion or skills to continue working in those mediums.
“I tried to sculpt and it was as if I had never touched clay before,” Marie says. “My harp that was once an extension of my body felt like a large haunting mass taking up space within my bedroom. My sculptures stood in my living room half completed and haunting me.”
During the early stages of her recovery, Marie was most often alone on bed rest. Her amnesia was such that she would sometimes lose her ability to speak or perform everyday functions like eating or getting dressed. In order to establish routines and make it through the day, she would leave herself lists with simple tasks and instructions like “make a bowl of cereal” or “try using the stove to boil an egg.”
Instead of doing word searches or puzzles to keep her mind occupied, Marie would spend hours exploring GarageBand on her iPad. Although the initial goal was to stimulate her brain and push forward its recovery, creating music soon became a ritual, an obsessive means of documenting her experiences and surroundings. Singing became a way to rediscover her voice and ability to speak. Rather than resting as ordered by her doctors, Marie would layer dozens of tracks into elaborate soundscapes and work endlessly on accompanying vocals. On occasion, the strain of her efforts was such that she would be thrust back into the fog of amnesia.
“Recording this record was a balancing act of using sound to regain function,” Marie explains, “of pushing myself into recovery and breaking something further that was fractured and healing. However, I used the record as a ritual for survival and recovering my ability to speak correctly. [It] was created as a sort of vocational rehabilitation and speech therapy. I came out of it speaking differently, singing differently, and making music differently.”
Of all the songs on Marie’s debut EP, none reflect this precarious tightrope walk as much as the record’s title track. As far as she can remember, “WeekdayWeekend” was the first song she wrote after the accident; it’s also the EP’s most conceptual composition. The song was written partially as a thank you to her best friend whom she started dating during her recovery. This was the person Marie entrusted to help her keep up with her development, to help her determine who she was and who she was becoming. But the song would come to take on much darker meaning when Marie’s faculties began to return and she discovered that much of what her boyfriend had told her—about both himself and their relationship—was a lie.
As a result, “WeekdayWeekend” reflects something both sweet and sinister like struggling through amnesia itself. The song’s title comes from a phrase Marie developed as a means to cope with her time on bed rest. And its closing loop—an endless spiral of chiming keys and ethereal vocals—is meant to set the listener adrift in a bewildering mist that lifts them out of time and space.
“The ending of ‘WeekdayWeekend’ is one of the most conceptual elements of the record because it loops so many times, it emulates what it feels like to have amnesia. It is almost like a sweet haze you can’t see through and loops so many times you ask yourself ‘How long has this loop been going on? Where are we now within the song? Is it over yet? Wait, what’s happening again?’ And then it starts all over. This sort of beautiful melody that loops over and over until you feel dizzy and disorients you, becomes haunting, eerily controlling your brain, which is how amnesia left me feeling during this moment in my life.”
Although the title track was completed in 2013 and the accompanying songs in 2014-15, it would take an additional six years for Weekday Weekend to see its release. In the first couple of years, Marie made significant strides in her recovery—enough to leave bed rest, return to art school at Georgia State University, and start a new relationship. Memories of her accident began to fade into the distance.
In further attempts to reconnect with her past and accelerate her recovery, Marie would force herself to sculpt or make what she calls “memory videos” where she would try to communicate with the past. Although the videos did little to help her remember who she once was, the process did spark an interest in photography, video, and sound. When she was finally able to return to school, she spent much of her time creating work that referenced the struggle to find her identity. This led to a period of immense creative exploration when Marie tried out various mediums in hopes of finding something that felt naturally her own. What she discovered was that both mentally and physically, everything had changed.
“I had this completely different perspective and shift or awakening I never would have been able to have before,” she says. “It completely changed my thought process. I was once in college for an incredibly tactile medium. I think being completely isolated from even my own self, mostly alone on bed rest for a year, my medium became almost my thought process. [So] I started making conceptual theory-based imagery. First, with my experiences of navigating finding my own identity and then with others.”
Then in 2015, she began filming the video for “WeekdayWeekend.” In the middle of shooting, Marie was involved in a car accident that left her with a crippling spinal injury. Production was shut down and she was once again forced to forego her creative aspirations and focus on recovery, surgeries, rehab, and school. The desire and impulse to make music left her and she began to wrestle with the idea that perhaps she needed to move on to other pursuits. But, as it turns out, much of this doubt and dismay was being fueled by a toxic relationship.
“Someone I thought that was helping me was going out of their way to control my recovery and what I was doing,” Marie recounts. “I wasn’t allowed to try and make music and I was consistently told I was ‘too broken’ to be with. It really damaged me and my sense of self that I had just developed. I had yet to realize that I was completely independent at this point, but was made to feel as if I ‘needed’ someone. the truth was that I didn’t. I was living alone in a house in Decatur and going to school full time and was constantly being told I wasn’t good enough to be with due to my body being hurt from an accident and my desire to try and make music again was taking away from my partner.”
Initially, the video was supposed to focus on Marie being lost in the woods, kidnapped and then saved by the red cardigan love interest who appears in the clip and was her boyfriend during filming. For years the footage was stored away and set to the side as she turned her attention to her studies in photography and research. Although she had managed to sever ties with her partner, the will to create music didn’t resurface. As she entered graduate school, Marie struggled to make peace with the idea that her future lay elsewhere.
Then it all came flooding back. Without warning, waves of melody and sound began to descend upon her with increasing force and frequency. Despite years of work and planning, Marie felt obligated to surrender to the undertow, to once again seek out what that elusive, magical piece of herself she had put to rest.
“It all came pouring back in fully,” she explains. “I heard sound again. Songs were coming to me in huge full waves with an entire band, sometimes orchestra, so quickly, all at once. At times, I couldn’t get it out or write it down fast enough. The music was coming to me all at once. In the snap of a finger, I would hear the entire song, every lyric—start to finish—all at one time. I just couldn’t ignore how much was coming out of me. It felt like some sort of calling in no way anything ever had before.”
After the remainder of Weekday Weekend came together in a whirlwind rush earlier this year, Marie decided to take a year off from graduate school in order to fully pursue music. In addition to completing the EP, she went through the old footage and decided to complete the short film for “WeekdayWeekend.” Within the span of a week, pages worth of shots with locations were executed, and Marie and her crew were left trying to figure out how to tie all the shots and plot points together. That’s when they all realized the red cardigan love interest needed to become the killer, not the savior.
“The ‘boy in the red sweater’ was the most detrimental thing to happen to me out of any of these accidents,” Marie says. “There were so many moments when shooting this video that someone would take me aside and say ‘what’s actually going on here?’ It wasn’t until months later I realized I was coping with the loss of myself from the second accident I was in. I was grappling with the expectations of my femininity and presentation of who I once was, the partner I once had and lost in the second accident, the mind fuck that was all of the lies and deceit from those closest to you when you can’t even trust your own brain. I was coping with the loss of my partner who I wished so badly could have saved me, but no one can actually save you. And you can’t salvage a relationship once it is lost from misuse of trust.”
Despite the video’s dark, dreamlike passages and its depiction of violence and betrayal, there is something uniquely beautiful and empowering about both its message and tortured protagonist. If you ask her about the accident today, Marie will speak mostly of luck and gratitude, of second chances and metamorphosis. In many ways, her inability to process what was happening is what allowed her the space to heal. But also the enormity of it all, the sheer overwhelming force of what occurred, forced her to grapple with existence in ways few of us may understand.
“In this strange way, I feel incredibly lucky for what happened to me,” says Marie. “Not only did I get this second chance at life, the things that then held me back from that accident, but I also had to navigate a completely different space and circumstances. It didn’t only shake me (shake things up) and what I was doing, it shifted my work into a space I never knew was possible.”
“When you completely lose yourself and who you are, you have no memory of pieces of you and who you were,” she continues. “It forces you to start completely over. Pieces of myself are starting to come back and slip back in but I feel incredibly humbled and grounded from this experience. Parts of me literally died and were unrecoverable and that unsettledness that I felt pushes me to always be wanting more and discover more. It made me realize that life is incredibly short and in a single moment, you could lose everything. I appreciate more, I love more. I make no apologies for my feelings if they are genuine and I do everything passionately and wholehearted.”
This idea of living without limits, of life without comprise, has become something of a mantra for Marie. If experience has taught her anything, it’s to forego the past and the future as much as possible and try to exist in the moment. To defy expectations at every turn. To embrace every opportunity with a combination of fierce gratitude and solemn grace.
In terms of her music career, this means rethinking the traditional narratives surrounding female artists and pushing the boundaries of her art and performance. Onstage her expressive dancing seems combative and rebellious. It’s a way for Marie to demand space and use her body and movement to push back against staid notions of what is expected. It’s liberating and empowering, to be sure, but also a reflection of where she wants to take her art moving forward.
In addition to recording a new record with a full orchestra and re-applying to graduate school, Marie has made the decision to cease playing venues and only perform in abandoned churches for the time being. The first of these performances will take place on Thu., Dec. 5 at 575 Boulevard SE alongside Brock Scott of Little Tybee and Park Ranger. Described as “heavily performative and conceptual,” guests to the show have been asked to bring a small bouquet of flowers to contribute to a vigil before the performance takes place.
When asked about the decision to perform solely at abandoned churches, Marie replies that she would prefer to keep the ideology surrounding her decision under wraps for now. But then she offers this:
“When you enter into an abandoned church you can almost feel the energy, the community and the feeling of what once was. There’s also something haunting within a space of abandoned devotion. I feel that this works conceptually with my music. If I was doing any other project I don’t think that this would work conceptually for anything else besides what I am writing about and making right now.”
If you’re wondering what to expect at the show, that remains very much a mystery. Marie does reveal that some pieces of the performance will be sincere, while others are intentionally silly, even as they delve into serious themes of loss and abuse. Each performative element within the show is meant to tell a story and share of piece of Marie’s life, while also tackling issues all women have to deal with.
“Being told they aren’t allowed to do something, aren’t allowed to take up space or be dominate, be aggressive as well as feminine, be funny and self-aware, be confident without being vain,” Marie elaborates. “Some of the performance deals with the concept of marriage. The deconstruction of devotion to another human being and being in love. How to balance love with identity and sense of self. And, of course—fuck boys. How to deal with being a woman in 2019 and dealing with the endless amount of fuck boys.”
Nadia Marie & the Seraphim Orchestra will perform on Thu., Dec. 5 at 575 Boulevard SE alongside Brock Scott (Little Tybee) and Park Ranger. Doors open at 8 p.m. Show start promptly at 8:15. Admission is $12. All ages.
More Info
Web: nadiamarieforever.com
Bandcamp: nadiamarie.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @nadiamarieforever
Instagram: @nadiamarieforever
SoundCloud: @nadiamarieforever