Most music is written, or at least performed, by groups of
people. Even if a songwriter or composer writes a song or a symphony in
isolation, it’s usually intended to be performed by some sort of
ensemble, be it a rock band or a philharmonic orchestra.
Then there’s music written and performed by one
person—and the further extension of that is the music written and
performed by one person with such a feeling of solitude that listening
to it almost feels like a voyeuristic peek into somebody’s
internal world.
The latter is the kind of music that Marry Mannor makes.
“The man on the moon, he said there’s no harm in being
lonely,” she sings in “Lover.”
Mannor is the sobriquet of one Gabrielle Guerrero, a Reno
22-year-old. She seems pensive and perhaps a tad self-conscious, but
with a wild excitability just beneath the surface. She thinks before
she speaks and takes a diffident tone but punctuates her stories with
interjections of “Oy vey!” and stories about alcohol
poisoning.
Her music draws heavily from Cat Power, Joanna Newsom and
CocoRosie—a grand tradition of feminine, idiosyncratic,
introverted music—and Guerrero leaves something of the impression
of a young talent still developing her own voice, but the promise is
there.
She played guitar in metal bands as a teenager and then in the
“minimalist acoustic folk duo” Mary Jane & Tilly Too.
The duo broke up and, after her arm was broken when she was hit by a
car, she couldn’t play guitar, so she took up the keyboard to
write the batch of songs that make up her mini-album, Come
Home.
The five-song album, recorded by Reno basement record impresario
Justin Morales, has an eerie, otherworldly sound: doubled vocals and
muted, fuzzy synthesizer recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine for
that analog warmth.
Guerrero’s lyrics focus on childhood nostalgia.
“A good song draws on memories and evokes something powerful
in somebody else,” she says. She adds that one of her favorite
tricks is to pair hopeful lyrics with sad-sounding music or vice
versa.
Come Home includes a cover of “Sea of Love,”
originally a hit in 1959 for Phil Phillips, and subsequently covered by
hundreds of people, including Del Shannon, Robert Plant and Tom Waits.
Though Marry Mannor’s version is most reminiscent of the version
that inspired it: Cat Power’s.
Guerrero mentions “Ms. Sanders” as a personal favorite
on Come Home. The title of the song, in a move sure to inspire
some nerd crushes, is an obscure Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy reference. But the song is a sort of delirious, allegorical
rumination on loss, with Guerrero’s high, yearning voice lilting,
“My hands, my hands, my hands, they don’t dig like they
used to …”
Her voice often has a childlike quality—something she
embraces.
“I kind of have a child’s voice, and I like it,”
she says. “I think adulthood is really fucked-up. I always say my
best friend is a recovering child, and I am, too.”