It is an unnerving thing interviewing your one true songwriting hero. You’d think that after spending your entire adolescence consuming the music of somebody who carried you through life, that you’d be naturally inclined to ask a million questions. This just isn’t the case, or it wasn’t for me.
Laura Marling was the emotional blueprint for my teenage years. She was who I turned to for solace and for wisdom. Her music taught me the importance of character, resilience, quiet strength and kindness. It taught me to be sceptical of men but open to falling in love. I owe everything to her. For every stage of my life, there has been a Laura Marling album for me to confide in, and grow with
Last month, Marling released her seventh studio album, Song for Our Daughter. It was originally slated for an August release until coronavirus tilted the world as we knew it, and left us desperate for some kind of comfort.
“In light of the change to all our circumstances, I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union,” Laura shared in a statement. “An album, stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it, is essentially a piece of me, and I’d like for you to have it.
Laura Marling – ‘Song For Our Daughter’
I was afforded the immense privilege of talking to Laura about Songs for our Daughter, which had been released a week prior.
“It’s quite nice, it’s a pretty day,” Marling says from her London home, it’s 7 am when I call. It’s weeks into lockdown now and I ask her how she’s coping.
“For the first couple of weeks, it was just like, shock and then routine. Now we’ve had some friends lose their parents, it’s started to get quite real, all of a sudden. Now I don’t answer that question in the same way that I have been before.”
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With Songs for our Daughter, Marling has made it her mission “defend The Girl.” To arm a generation of women with knowledge learned through her own experience. Inspired by Maya Angelou’s Letter to My Daughter, a series of essays to a fictional daughter. The record is a masterful, delicate exploration of womanhood, trauma, and the loss of innocence. As a young woman who has been profoundly guided by the work of Marling, I ask whether she considers that her music has carried so many women, like me, through life.
“What’s been funny about releasing this album is that because I’ve had to get my head around social media very quickly to participate in it to some extent. That’s partly to do these guitar tutorials, but it’s also partly because I know there’s no other way of promoting the album — it is crass in some ways at the moment because I can’t tour. The funny consequence of that is that I’ve seen all of these comments and messages from people.
“I know I sound like an old person talking about it.”
“They all appear to be my age, or slightly younger. It’s really interesting to see that the people that feel very strongly about the albums are people kind of like me. I don’t think about who I’m writing for, ever, but I found that really reassuring. In my head, I sort of feel like it might just be old men, but it’s not.”
From the dawn of her career, Marling has explored, painted portraits of and embodied different women in her songwriting. When asked about why she feels compelled to write about womanhood, she responds, “I haven’t really figured it out yet,”
“I think when I was a bit younger and I was truly not self-aware, and when I listen back to those records now I see that I was doing exactly the same thing then. I was sort of, playing this character of a very unfairly and unjustly hard-done-by woman — and I didn’t really know what was coming for me.
“I didn’t really know that I was about to go into a world where the structure of the world really serves that narrative. I think the difference between what I wrote then and what I write now is that now I understand that you don’t have to unconsciously fall into that character.”
She continues, “I don’t have to keep writing that character. What’s more interesting is the unwritten, the unfamiliar characters in popular culture. The reason may be why it speaks to people is because it’s very true to women. Women know that they have this experience. It’s just not very often replicated, and if it is replicated it’s replicated in a way that involves lots of cliches and convenient narrative structure, that’s part of this internalised narrative.
“I do hate the word narrative but I’ve said it twice.”
Over the past year, Marling has been pursuing a Master’s degree in psychoanalysis. “I always had a bit of a hangup about — I left school at sixteen and I didn’t have any qualifications,” she explains when I asked about her decision to study.
“A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I admire had been very well educated. I just thought I’m never going to get rid of this anxiety unless I tackle it. I did a couple of years of an undergraduate degree.
“I found the specific thing that I wanted to study because I had been a patient of psychoanalysis for many years. What’s been interesting about doing it, it’s a very interesting subject. It’s essentially a brilliant, really expensive reading list.
“What has been very eye-opening for me is that there are thirty people in my course, and there are four people in the course that are so clearly brilliant, it just comes so easily to them. That in a way reassured me, those people were always going to be brilliant. Those people that I admire in my life, where always the best of the best. Their specialist subject is academia and my specialist subject is songwriting.
“It eased some insecurities in ways that I hadn’t expected it to.”
When asked if studying psychoanalysis has impacted her songwriting, she explains that she only undertook her masters a year ago, after finishing writing Songs for our Daughter. However, being a patient of psychoanalysis has allowed her to calm the dreaded seas of navigating through the media circuit. “I think being in psychoanalysis has been very beneficial,” she explains.
“I found that a lot of the subject matter of this and the previous album, the anticipation of talking about it I found quite anxiety-inducing. I didn’t want that to affect the way that I was writing the songs. I think that therapy, in any form helps you to feel in control of certain things, so you don’t have a hysterical outburst.”
“Two weeks ago when we decided to release this album, I suddenly got flooded with a sense of dread that I was going to have to talk about it for a couple of weeks. This one in particular, with Semper Femina I had some uncomfortable questioning about why I decided to write only about women.
“The very few people that are interested can sometimes ask for more than what the album wants to give. I guess.”
Marling has just entered her thirties. When asked what the most important lesson she learnt in her twenties was she responded, “I wish I had prepared a good answer for this.”
“In terms of being a woman, I think not letting people take credit for your work takes a long time to figure out, but also being diplomatic about how you handle that sort of thing.
“I think diplomacy. My late twenties has been about diplomacy. How you manage tricky situations in the most diplomatic way.”
She doesn’t want to project meaning onto someone’s experience with her work, “I want people to have their own experience of an album,” Marling explains.
“I don’t ever want people to have too much of an idea of what they should take away.”
The record swells with emotionally revelatory lyrics, one in particular that stood out was “I won’t write a woman with a man on my mind,” from ‘Only The Strong’.
Laura Marling – ‘Only The Strong’
“I think that was written in reference to a diplomatic situation in which one has spent a lot of time considering how to navigate a mans feelings,” Marling explains. “And how difficult that is for an empath — women are naturally empathic— and realising that all of the time you’re spending doing that is taking away time that could be yours.
“Feeling men’s feelings for them is something I’ve done too many times. I’ve been the articulator of men’s feelings for far too long.
“In dealing with that diplomatically it’s also saying there’s a real problem with the masculine vocabulary. Society hasn’t taught them to express themselves in a way that makes things clear.”
At 21, Marling moved to Los Angeles to seek independence. After a hiatus in music-making and an attempted reinvention as a yoga instructor, she found herself alone, identity void and “socially bankrupt.” When asked about what her proudest achievement is, Laura confidently declares. “My relationship with my family is my proudest achievement.”
She continues, “It’s been quite hard work, in the best possible way, just as everybody’s family is. Now I live in this unbelievably idyllic situation where my sister and my nephew live down the road, my other sister lives with me, and my partner and brother in law get along really well. We live in this sort of little, commune.”
“When I lived in LA for five years I didn’t have anything like that. I was so distant from family. Now I don’t take this for granted at all It’s so special, I love it.”
