Taking the reins
Singer-songwriter resurfaces after years lost to trauma and grief.
Nina Nastasia
★★★★★
Riderless Horse
TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD. CD/DL/LP
IT’S BEEN 12 years since Nina Nastasia released her last album, Outlaster, its sleeve featuring a pulp-horror style portrait of the Hollywood-born singer-songwriter. Yet nobody – not even her friends, kept at careful arm’s length – recognised the alltoo-real everyday darkness running through Nastasia’s life. For 25 years, she was locked into a psychologically abusive relationship with her manager and close collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson: their tiny Brooklyn apartment increasingly became their world; his impossible standards for her music left Nastasia feeling as if she was the “weak link” – “if I didn’t succeed, I was failing somebody else at the same time.” Hoping to extinguish a relationship flashpoint, she made the decision to stop making music.
On January 26, 2020, Nastasia decided she had to leave – as she sings on Ask Me, a track from her remarkable seventh LP Riderless Horse, “I’ll be the one to choose life over illness”. The next day, Gudjonsson took his own life.
Recorded with Steve Albini (as with all her records since the astonishing folk-gothic of her 2000 debut Dogs), Riderless Horse is her reckoning with this traumatic history. With almost documentary clarity, it catches all the shame, despair, and guilt – but also flashes of joy and love, glimpses of hope, and on the sudden revelations of the Will Oldham-like The Two Of Us, a final resolve to save herself.
This Is Love brutally pulls apart the very idea of a love song; Afterwards is a complicated survivor’s testimony ending with the defining line, “I am ready to live”. Yet there’s scarcely a lyric that doesn’t demand to be highlighted. “You set a blaze inside our house/ You burned it down and smoked us out,” she sings on the from-the-floor keen of You Were So Mad. Nature’s febrile waltz, meanwhile, maps a violent dance of dysfunction: “Sometimes you get ahead of it/And sometimes you’re in the thick of all his anger and pain.” Even the songs that move more lightly – Just Stay In Bed; Blind As Batsies (a dampened White Stripes’ We’re Going To Be Friends) – are capsized by death, a moment of paralysis, bar-hopping happiness slowly curdling into meanness. Just Nastasia’s subtly shifting voice (like her words, she never overdoes it) and acoustic guitar, it would be hard to listen to if it wasn’t so lovely.
Inevitably, it’s difficult to detach this record from the harrowing specificity of its backstory, yet Riderless Horse never makes you feel like an intruder. That’s testament, after 12 long years, to Nastasia’s skills, the undimmed songwriter able to transform all the pain and horror into something indelibly beautiful.