"Marzanna": Breathing New Life into the Timeless
Welcome Marzanna, the alter-ego of singer-songwriter Marianne Nowottny—a persona she's worn for a long while, now rising into light with a breathtaking new album. This album is not any typical set of covers; it's a reading, a conjuring, a poetic dialogue with the ghosts of musical heritage. Traces previously worked over by Kate Bush, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and Siouxsie and the Banshees are re-stirred here in Nowottny's vivid wordings and unmistakable voice. Each track is incantatory, a testament to the idea that the familiar can be recharged as easily as uncanny when filtered through an artist who inhabits the intersection of respect and re-imagination.
While Marianne has indeed been including covers in her setlists throughout—her sets peppered with touchstones from Nico, the Platters, Johnny Cash, and Astrud Gilberto—here is the first time she's gone full-in on the genre. "This album almost never happened," she confesses, and upon listening back, you feel the sense of struggle she fought it in its very roots. What began as an idea expanded throughout a wild five years of misfires, overhauls, and stomach-dropping hard-drive crashes that wiped finished tracks into the ether. But from all the strife, the work continued on, inching its way into being. The resolve is evident, as though each note carries both the anger of it all and the liberty of liberation.
The collaborators who joined her along the way add to the album’s richness, their contributions like brushstrokes on a shared canvas. There is Gordon Raphael, engineering “I’m Deranged” and “You’re My Thrill” with the sharp clarity of someone who understands atmosphere as architecture. There’s Sonisk Blodbad, lending experimental textures to “Winter Moon,” illuminated further by Rhea Thompson’s guitar. A German-language duet, "Stella Maris," comes into full flower in heavenly loveliness accompanied by Christian Corea singing. Breakthrough harp playing by Katie Lo reworks "Both Sides Now" as delicate slivers of glass, and orchestral performances by Kathleen Arndt, Gita Asri, and Paul Cecchetti lend the album its cinematic sweep.
Finally, in the capable hands of Peerless Mastering's Jeff Lipton and Costanza Tinti, Marzanna is not just an album – it's a renaissance. It's a tribute to the power of artistic determination and a love letter to the fact that music can be reinvented. August 14, 2025, sees this album released as a call to hear the known anew, as summoned by evening and renewed glowing with an unearthly light. Under Marzanna's wings, songs don't just survive but are reimagined, more mystical and breathed, returning anew as other and afire.
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