“Marzanna” - Marianne Nowottny
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
Some albums feel like projects, and others feel like pilgrimages. Marianne Nowottny’s Marzanna is definitely the latter. Long whispered about, nearly derailed by broken hard drives and lost files, and stretched across a five-year haze of stops and starts, the record has finally surfaced—and it’s worth every ounce of the struggle that went into making it. This isn’t just a covers album; it’s a séance. With Marzanna, Nowottny resurrects her longtime alter ego and reanimates songs by Kate Bush, Bowie, Joni, and Siouxsie—not as nostalgia pieces, but as living, breathing works reimagined in her singular voice.
What makes the record so compelling is the sheer strangeness and intimacy of Nowottny’s phrasing. She doesn’t simply sing these songs—she inhabits them, twisting lines and lingering on syllables until they feel brand new. Kate Bush’s theatricality, Bowie’s alien glamour, Joni Mitchell’s quiet devastation—all of it gets refracted through her dusky, otherworldly delivery. The familiar becomes uncanny.
And the collaborations here add even more texture to the world of Marzanna. Gordon Raphael (yes, the same Gordon Raphael who helped shape The Strokes’ early sound) engineers “I’m Deranged” and “You’re My Thrill” with a sharp, hypnotic edge. “Winter Moon,” a spectral team-up with experimental collective Sonisk Blodbad and guitarist Rhea Thompson, shimmers like a fever dream. Then there’s “Stella Maris,” sung in German as a duet with Christian Corea, which feels like it was unearthed from some obscure European art film. The crown jewel might be “Both Sides Now,” backed by award-winning harpist Katie Lo—what could have been a straightforward nod to Joni instead blossoms into something fragile and glowing, a mix of reverence and reinvention.
The orchestral flourishes from Kathleen Arndt, Gita Asri, and Paul Cecchetti expand the palette even further, draping these songs in lush, sometimes unsettling arrangements. And Jeff Lipton and Costanza Tinti’s mastering makes sure the whole thing lands like a spell: warm, full, and a little haunted around the edges.
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
What’s striking is how personal Marzanna feels for a covers album. Marianne doesn’t use these songs as a crutch or a platform—she uses them as a diary, a prism for her own reflections. You can hear the years of labor and loss in the way she stretches the word thrill, or the way she leans into Bowie’s fractured alien poetry. The project carries the emotional weight of someone who nearly gave up on it, only to keep going because the music simply wouldn’t let her quit.
Marzanna is less about “paying tribute” than it is about showing how songs live differently in different hands. It’s a reminder that interpretation is itself an art form—and in Nowottny’s case, one she was born to practice. These tracks aren’t museum pieces; they’re apparitions, reshaped by an artist who has always thrived at the intersections of beauty, dissonance, and reinvention.
The album could have easily stayed lost in the digital void, but instead it emerged as something richer: a shadow-world of classics that feel startlingly alive again. And maybe that’s the real power of Marzanna—to take the familiar, strip it bare, and let us hear it with fresh, haunted ears.
“Marzanna” is available now on all major streaming platforms
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