As a young girl from Southern California, Nina Nastasia found her sense of freedom on the Pacific Coast Highway, a stretch of road that promised picnics on the beach, lazy heat, and days that felt oceanic and undefined. Nastasia was confronted with freedom once again in her mid-50s, when she relearned to drive and returned to the Pacific Coast Highway in search of a home that no longer existed. Jolie Laide, Nastasia’s new self-titled project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod, is a kind of travelogue that traces the line between freedom and empty aimlessness: a child’s oceanside liberty that becomes an adult’s existential terror.
Prior to her trip, Nastasia had lived the majority of her adult life in New York City, sharing a small apartment with her partner and musical collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson. From the late ’90s to the mid-2000s, she earned a cult following for her songwriting—part gothic, part Americana, full of emotions that confused and contradicted one another. John Peele and Steve Albini counted Nastasia among their favorite musicians. She released her sixth album in 2010 and then, for over a decade, seemed to disappear. In 2022, she released Riderless Horse, her first album in 12 years, which was written in the immediate aftermath of her partner’s death and partially explained her absence. Riderless Horse was a spartan, frenzied retrospective of the couple’s complicated years together, plainly and painfully transposing Nastasia’s grief.
She re-learned to drive and soon after reached out to MacLeod, a musician she’d met some 20 years earlier, when he played with the dark dream-pop outfit Cape May. MacLeod is a largely improvisational guitarist, riffing on and subverting well-worn Americana tropes. The electric guitar features sporadically across Nastasia’s previous output, but it’s at the center of the mix on her first project with MacLeod; his playing adds a sense of place and cultural topography to Nastasia’s cross-country roadtrip. On Jolie Laide, MacLeod digs into the repertoire of American popular song to represent West Coast musical history and dredges up sludgier tones for Nastasia’s desert dirges. His guitar adds a sense of sweetened dread to Nastasia’s emotional realism, an inventive expression of her internal world.
“Back to the west,” Nastasia begins the album, singing in her breeziest voice. MacLeod’s guitar is similarly buoyant, but each upstroke introduces a sense of creeping dread. The songs’ lumbering sense of tension is keenist on “Away Too Soon,” a song that Nastasia and MacLeod perform with a touch of heaviness, as if trying and failing to drag themselves out of a dream, searching for a satisfying burst of energy that never comes. Nastasia’s voice is like a stress ball; no matter how much pressure she applies, it always returns to its original, equipoised form. Similarly, MacLeod’s guitar goes back and forth between major and minor, two oppositional forces canceling out.
Jolie Laide has a clear narrative and novelistic form. In the West, Nastasia finds a lover, someone to “move her along,” a brief and unsustainable source of hope. “We’ve got horses to ride,” she sings on “Moves Away Towns,” gesturing back to Riderless Horse. By the album’s middle, romantic disequilibrium gives way to the volatility of alcohol. MacLeod’s guitar grows hazier, Nastasia’s voice more lethargic. She trades existential emptiness for an empty horizon, recreating the small world of childhood through the routine of bar-hopping and blacking out. “Drinkin’ us thin till we both fade away,” she sings on “Why I Drink,” MacLeod’s guitar veering between a tottering riff and a drunken strum. He provides an irreverent foil to Nastasia’s downward journey on Jolie Laide, bringing a dynamic frisson and exchange that deepens her storytelling.
In the album’s final act, Nastasia is no closer to finding her home nor closing in on her terrible freedom; she feels only the familiarity of a hangover on the strangeness of the road. With all sense of lightness abated, her voice lowers to a sneer. It’s in this darkness—and particularly on “Isolation View,” the album’s grimmest song—that MacLeod and Nastasia allow themselves a moment of release. MacLeod’s glowering counterpoint stands against Nastasia’s powerful weariness and achieves a kind of exhilarating devastation. “Your isolation tank is like a bubble,” she scoffs, abstracting the home she sought to find into an almost unintelligible image, her once bright-eyed view fuzzed over. In freedom, she finds herself, finally, alone.
