Proof of Life

“All my life is based on fantasy,” Marnie Stern announces at the start of “Proof of Life,” and it sounds like she might have a point. Here is a woman whose songs usually erupt into firestorms of guitar, whose vocals are always pitch-shifted to sound like a chorus of angry fairies; a woman who, indeed, tends to rely on the partial fantasies of (among others) virtuosic musicianship and electronic signal processing. In this song, however, Stern sings in her natural voice, accompanied primarily by a piano; in the flow of her last album, The Chronicles of Marnia, the quiet arrives so jarringly that you know the circumstances are heavy even before she says a word. The din pared down, her voice unvarnished and raw, Stern begins sorting through some serious doubts about her creative work and the life it props up. 

At first she is directionless, paralyzed by the notion that her goals and values are illusory. “All the gods, they’ve stopped talking to me, / and I cannot find it,” she says, asking someone—the gods?—to “give me a sign.” One imagines her as a shattered mythic hero, scanning the auspices of birds flying by for any hint of wisdom. Crucially, she’s not looking to herself for help: she seems certain the “sign” will come from without, enough so to ignore her own will. “I am nothing,” she chants throughout the song, sounding determined to make herself believe. “I am no one.”

What sign is she looking for? What is the “it” she cannot find? The song is called “Proof of Life,” but Stern doesn’t seem to be looking for evidence of her existence so much as justification for its course. In interviews she has spoken of realizing that her life in music may never mean significant financial rewards or long-term security, so it is reasonable to hear “Proof of Life” as a way of wondering whether the labors of full-time musicianship are worth it. Picture this crisis of faith happening in some obscure hotel room, late at night in the midst of a money-losing touring run: “I am running out of energy,” she laments. “I’m searching but there’s so much I can’t see.”

We also know that “Proof of Life” was a difficult song for Stern to make. The idea of recording without her customary vocal effects, and with fewer layers of careening guitars, was not hers but her...