FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Hollie Fernando for The Line of Best Fit
Part One: Laura Marling
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THE idea behind this feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
is to acknowledge and investigate the best female artists in music right now. I am winding up my Female Icons feature, and it has been great writing that. Now, as I look to those women who are shaping up to be icons of the future, I am compelled to look at Laura Marling. In my opinion, she is one of the most original songwriters on the planet. I have been following her since the debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, in 2008 and I was instantly hooked. Marling is twenty-nine now so, to have created such a confident and assured album eleven years ago, it kind of staggers the mind! Laura Marling is one of those artists who, I feel, has never dropped a step! Her albums are always received well, and her songwriting is incredibly strong. In terms of overall acclaim, maybe Alas, I Cannot Swim does not get the same affection as her later albums. Even so, that brilliantly husky and captivating voice recalls artists from the 1970s such as Joni Mitchell; there is a maturity and grace to her songwriting that one cannot find with other artists. With songwriters like Feist and Duffy gathering a lot of attention in 2008, maybe Marling struggled in that sense. Whilst her music is much more intriguing and accomplished, it was a year when eyes were pointing elsewhere. It was clear that, from her debut, Marling was something different.
When speaking with Jude Rogers in 2008, Marling’s songwriting, approach and sources of inspiration were uncovered:
"No, no, seriously," she goes on. "Take another look. My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism." She tips her head impishly. "Some are depressing, and I have depressive sides to my character, like most people, but I'm always telling myself to look on the bright side."
In a music scene teeming with talented young women, Marling stands apart as quite possibly Britain's most promising singer-songwriter. She's not a soul-influenced ingenue like Adele or Duffy, nor a pop performer in the style of Lily Allen or Kate Nash (with whom she has toured), but an accomplished performer in the folk vein. In fact, she manages to make folk feel modern. Her bold, dark songs recall Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, yet remain her own. She has already notched up a Glastonbury performance and, hilariously, was refused entry to her own gig at a London venue for being too young - so she busked outside instead.
She gets a lot from books; her favourite authors are Jane Austen and the Brontës. "They're always made out to be so sweetly romantic, but they're not - they're brutal. I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that." She admits to struggling with some writers, and pulls two books out of her bulky handbag to make her point: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and comedian Russell Brand's autobiography, My Booky Wook. "The Joyce is really interesting, but guess which one I've been reading today." She raises an eyebrow theatrically. "It's really well-written, though!"
For someone so young, Marling writes convincingly about breakdowns, tough emotions and sex. Her characters are strong, fighting to protect the people they hold close. One song on the album, Night Terror, contains a particularly affecting line about a lover having a nightmare: "I roll over and shake him tightly and whisper, if they want you, well, then they're gonna have to fight me." Marling admits the songs are personal, but will divulge nothing more. "It's just stream-of-consciousness stuff, really. And like everyone else, my consciousness has dark, jagged parts. Especially when it's four in the morning and something's happened and you have to write about it".
Laura Marling has released six solo albums – and one as part of LUMP –, and I think she has grown stronger as time has progressed. That is evident on her 2010 album, I Speak Because I Can. The album sees Marling looking at the roles of men and women in society. Marling approached the album from a first-person viewpoint, but we do not hear many songs about Marling’s thoughts and personal life – the album is more observational and poetic. Various songs are inspired by literature – Devil’s Spoke: Homer’s Odyssey; I Speak Because I Can: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad -, and the standout from the album, Goodbye England (Covered in Snow), was compelled by a family walk by a church in the winter. Marling’s second album is a more developed and nuanced work; perhaps she was finding her true voice. In this review from The Telegraph, they pay tribute to a darker, deeper songwriter:
“The new Marling is darker and more sophisticated. She opens proceedings with a drunken, midnight maypole dance of a song. Devil’s Spoke builds from a shadowy portrait of pastoral loneliness into an increasingly frenzied, banjo-spun romance ending with lovers “eye to eye, nose to nose/ripping off each others clothes in a most peculiar way”. Whereas so much music coming from the “nu-folk” scene sounds like nature recollected in safety, by the glowing fire of some Olde Taverne, Marling’s sounds starkly exposed to the English elements. Her songs are simple yet complex, weird but quotidien like hedgerows – twisted, full of thorns, fruit, life and death. You can hear a thrill at the savagery as well as the sweetness of our landscape in the unflinching alto that sings: “I’ll never love England more than when covered in snow.”
Many of the songs struggle with Marling’s conflicted yearning for both traditional monogamy and unfettered independence. “I tried to be a girl who likes to be used,” she sings on Goodbye England, “I’m too good for that/ There’s a mind under this hat.” Elsewhere she gazes back into Greek mythology for female companionship, addressing the marriage goddess Hera and conjuring the spirit of Odysseus’ patient wife Penelope. I Speak Because I Can is my favourite release of the year so far – and certainly an album worth sailing home for”.
The sheer majesty of the songwriting is breathtakling! For an artist so young, one is staggered by the intelligence and wisdom of the songs. That may seem patronising but, back in 2010/2011, there were few songwriters who displayed the same sort of brilliance as Laura Marling. I still think she is our finest songwriter and someone who, as I said, changed skin and incorporated something new into every album. 2011’s A Creature I Don’t Know is my personal favourite. The songs came together after she completed her I Speak Because I Can tour of 2010. This was a period of isolation and, perhaps, loneliness where Marling spent time in cafes reading books; working on crosswords and scribbling in notebooks. That images seems quite romantic but (it was a time) when Marling was transitioning and figuring things out. Marling wrote and worked on the songs long before she brought them in for her band.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ian West/PA
Her first couple of albums were more collaborative, in the sense she was working with the likes of Charlie Fink and knocking songs into shape with others. Given the fact the material was written the way it was, it is not a surprise to hear that Marling wanted to get the sound just right before she approached the musicians. The album gained hugely positive reviews – Marling has never received a bad review -, and this is AllMusic’s take:
“Marling's vocal affectations, which are ultimately charming despite their frequent Joni Mitchell-isms, are far more apparent this time around, especially on the album’s first three tracks, all of which showcase a fervent singer/songwriter with a fiercely independent spirit who’s tempered by a strong familiarity with her parents’ record collection. That said, it’s a syllabus that’s been ingested and honed rather than spit out and glossed over, and most of the time, Marling makes a great case for all of those Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson comparisons. Brimming with life and lush with spanish guitar, rolling banjos, summer of love chord changes, and moor-bound tales of love gone bad, A Creature I Don’t Know is ultimately triumphant, due in great part to Marling's magnificent codeine voice, which sounds like it’s been pouring out of the radio for five decades, especially on stand-out cuts like “Sophia,” “The Beast,” “My Friends,” and “All My Rage.” Three albums in, the young singer/songwriter sounds brave and confident yet breakable and guarded, and while A Creature I Don’t Know may not be the bolt from the blue fans and critics were hoping for, it’s most certainly storm born”.
Marling gave a few interviews to promote the album – Marling is selective about who she speaks with – and, in this feature with The Guardian, we learn more about the time around A Creature I Don’t Know’s creation and Marling’s growing confidence:
“The period of isolation, writing and demoing the material alone, as well as working out the vocal arrangements before she played any of the songs to her band or her producer, were reflective of Marling's growing self-assurance. "It was quite an interesting way of doing it," she says, "because it allowed me to put my stamp on it before anybody else put their stamp on it. With the first two albums – Charlie [Fink, lead singer of Noah and the Whale and Marling's ex-boyfriend] produced Alas I Cannot Swim, and it's as much his album as it is mine, and with I Speak Because I Can, the style of the drumming and the bass playing is very much a representation of the characters who were playing on that album, and Ethan [Johns, the producer] stepping in as well. This time I thought: 'Well, I've got the confidence now, and I know what I want it to sound like, so before anybody else gets their grubby mitts on it, why don't I put my stamp on it?'"
Marling's burgeoning confidence is also a reflection of a young woman increasingly at ease with her status. "I think earlier on I was trying to prove I was a songwriter," she says. "But now I really struggle with the idea of referring to myself, or someone referring to me as an artist. It makes me shudder a bit. But then there's some parts of me that would like to proudly say that I'm an artist … I just wouldn't ever want to use it anywhere in between." She laughs. "One day, in retrospect maybe I'll say: 'I was an artist once upon a time… '"
Work on Once I Was an Eagle started as early as 2011; songs such as Master Hunter and Pray for Me were imagined before the release of A Creature I Don’t Know. Rather than produce a cast of characters or have various angles, there is a simplicity and focus to Once I Was an Eagle. Written in three tunings – moving from more uplifting songs such as Saved These Words to darker tones on Take the Night Off, for instance -, we see a central figure push away the naivety of love before embracing it once again. Once I Was an Eagle saw Marling move from working with a band and stripping things back. With Producer Ethan Johns and cellist, Ruth de Turberville, the album was recorded in Bath over the course of about ten days. In this interview with Under the Radar, Marling talked about her change in process.
"For the last two records we'd done all the tapes live with the band, and I wasn't recording with a band this time, so I sat down and played the record start to finish," she says.
Once I Was an Eagle also evidences Marling's continued growth as a guitarist, with her playing leaning more toward the blues and her guitar work more to the forefront. Much of this was influenced by her newfound obsession with late '60s/early '70s music.
"I pretty much only listened to music made between 1969 and 1972," she says. "In that era, guitar was becoming a kind of masculine extension, kind of hedonistic. I found that Captain Beefheart rhythms and Creedence riffs and things like that, they do something for me."
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Marling also demonstrates a continued willingness to examine issues such as feminism and women's roles. Though she has written about these topics since her Mercury Prize-nominated 2008 debut, she still is not convinced she has any definitive answers.
"One of my great pleasures in life is that I'm constantly being proved wrong and feeling more and more naïve, which is actually a quite liberating feeling," she says. "I find that women's lib and femininity and equality are very touchy subjects and need to be approached with a lot of care. In my mind, there are infinite answers and opinions on those things and I enjoy exploring them. I haven't come to a conclusion on them yet".
This sixteen-track album is packed with evocative moments and truly arresting songs. The set of reviews that greeted Once I Was an Eagle were the strongest to date. Small wonder when one considers the variation in You Know, Master Hunter and Devil’s Resting Place! One is totally engrossed in the music and, in my opinion, Once I Was an Eagle is one of the finest albums of this decade.
The most-recent two solo albums from Marling, again, have seen her move in different directions. There were attempts to write music for an album after Once I Was an Eagle, but Marling was not happy with the results. Short Movie eventually came about, but not before Marling took a few months off from music. Given the fact she was touring heavily and producing albums fairly regularly, one can forgive the songwriter for needing time to recharge and rest. Marling was living in Los Angeles at the time and Short Movie reflects the spiritual and mystical aspects of the city; Marling found inspiration and, in a first, produced the album herself. Short Movie is a different beast in a number of ways. Oddly, it is the first album not to have a six-syllable title; she also added in a bowed electronic guitar sound to give the album a sound akin to background noise – maybe trying to project the sound of a short film in an urban environment. Isolation and loneliness raise its head on Short Movie; the idea of seeming separate in a city like Los Angeles. Tracks like Don’t Let Me Bring You Down reflect how cities like L.A. can have negative effects. That is not to say Short Movie lacks compassion and warmth: it is a varied and wonderful record that finds Marling digging deep. In fact, a few songs are taken from experiences Marling had in different parts of America.
It is an itinerant album and one that boasts so many powerful moments – the Hurricane Sandy-inspired False Hope is one such example. Reviews were positive once more. NME provided their take on Short Movie:
“Yet while there's a Yankee bloom on the English rose, 'Short Movie' isn't an outright volte-face. Warning well-meaning boys of the perils of falling in love with her is a recurrent theme of Marling's. She revisits it on 'Warrior', whose sighing rebuke of "I can't be your horse anymore, you're not the warrior I'm looking for" makes it clear that her priority is walking her own path, not making someone else's easier. 'Strange' is blunter still: "Should you fall in love with me, your love becomes my responsibility and I can never do you wrong... do you know how hard that is?" She often tempers candour with moments of sweetness, but even 'How Can I', for all its wistful talk of "riding up mountains, turning corners in our lives", has the spectre of impermanence hanging over it; the song ends with Marling, "going back east, where I belong", alone.
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
More than anything else, it's that restlessness, that fear of becoming too comfortable or complacent by staying in one place, which seems to define Marling. There's no overarching narrative to 'Short Movie' - it plays out like a series of vignettes, of moods and moments, people and places - but there is a sense of a journey completed, with a hard-won wisdom at the end of it. Marling is her own protagonist - flawed, like anyone else, but utterly compelling all the same”.
I shall round things off but, in 2017, Marling released the majestic Semper Femina. It is my favourite album of 2017, and I was struck by the differences between this record and Short Movie. The first track I heard from the album was the single, Soothing. It is seductive, breathy and magnificent - a very different sound to what we were used to. I want to bring in a couple of interviews Marling conducted around the time that reveal quite a lot. When speaking with The Guardian, she talks about her attitude to having her picture taken (and image in general):
“Notably, the record’s tendency to look at women – lingeringly, lovingly – extended to Marling herself. “I think probably a big part of this album was me needing to love myself, which is a bit cringe to say.” Indeed, Nouel sees Marling’s gaze refracted back towards herself. The album’s title, which roughly translates to “always woman”, is an abbreviation of a line from Virgil: “varium et mutabile semper femina” – woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing. In the song, Marling applies the epithet to both her and Nouel, in a luxuriant whirl of feminine connection and reflection.
Marling originally decided to embark on a career in music to “prove a point – that I could if I wanted to. I was sick of people trying to take my guitar away from me even though I was good.” Yet even after years of prodigious success – record contract at 16, a formidable back catalogue by her mid-20s – her instrument still gets prised out of her hands, with helpful colleagues telling Marling not to “worry about playing the guitar, I’ll play the guitar”.
One gaze Marling feels no ambivalence towards, however, is that of the camera. “I think I’m pretty, but I fucking hate having my photo taken,” she explains. “On this album campaign, I was like fine, I’ll do a private photoshoot, and I’ll get 10 images and give them to all the papers and that’s all. And then every paper wants their own picture and they threaten you with ‘We won’t cover you if you don’t’, and that’s crazy. I’ve got much more important things to do than have my photograph taken.”
In an industry where Instagram accounts, clothing lines and flamboyant pregnancy announcement pictures seem as much a part of an artist’s oeuvre as their music, Marling’s rejection of the image-hungry zeitgeist feels palliative. As does, in a world of ear-splittingly abrasive production and knowing popstar posturing, her preoccupation with the acoustic guitar and the introspective mood it facilitates. Marling describes herself as an introvert. “I think it’s why I don’t relate to a lot of extroverted music, most of what’s in the charts,” she says. “Because a lot of my experience on the planet is in my brain. Maybe I’m lacking in experience and rich in thought, which is not necessarily useful”.
In a great interview with The Line of Best Fit, Marling discussed gender and roles; getting to the heart of the album and its inspiration:
“Taking ownership of her gender, she concluded that her masculine and feminine traits need not remain mutually exclusive. “I think I would have got to that eventually,” she nods, as we ponder the depths she has scoured to reach such a conclusion. “It’s something to do with the societal effects of my upbringing, that I found it not obvious. I found it difficult to manage, through no one’s direct fault. But yes, that is exactly what I was exploring, my internal relationship to my central self, which doesn’t really have a compartmentalised gender, it’s more like two gases that intertwine.”
This realisation revealed a flaw to Marling early on when writing Semper Femina. Poised to explore femininity and female relationships in each of the album’s songs, she realised halfway through writing “The Valley”, the first song written for the album, that she had naturally started writing as if she was a man rather than a woman with masculine characteristics.
“It was a lightbulb,” she says. “I was like, this sounds like a man going to rescue a woman. At first I thought, yes, OK. Sometimes you do reflect yourself as fantasy in a song. But then I was like, no. This is not me turning around fantasy. This is me…this is me”.
Semper Femina is the last studio album from Laura Marling and, having covered such ground through the years, one can understand if she waits another year or two before considering her next endeavour. She is not even thirty and, so far, she has already released more world-class albums than most artists do in their lifetime. It must be a bit scary knowing that there is such universal love and expectation; maybe Marling will never receive a bad review, but one feels Marling is more concerned with the quality of the music and making sure she makes albums that are true to her. Before talking about her latest studio effort, I wanted to track back her Reversal of the Muse project/podcast from 2016. It is a powerful and fascinating examination of the role of women and how, in this day, there is still inequality and a lack of women in certain sectors of music. This article gives you more details:
“Reversal of the Muse’s focus on the structural limitations of the industry comes at a time when women are still a rarity on the technical side of music. It’s estimated that less than 5 percent of music engineers and producers are female, and only six female producers have ever been nominated for the prestigious Producer of the Year, Non-Classical award at the Grammys.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hollie Fernando for The Line of Best Fit
The ways in which women’s contributions in general are often overlooked in the music industry come up frequently in the podcast, including in one episode featuring the British musician Marika Hackman. She talked about feeling frustrated when the coverage surrounding her 2015 debut full-length album focused more on her model looks, clothing, and friendship with Cara Delevingne, than on the merits of her music. Elsewhere on Reversal of the Muse, guests dissect the “boy’s club” that is life on the road, which ultimately leads to a discussion of how women are expected to behave, and more specifically challenges the notion that a woman must always be “sweet”.
Reversal of the Muse is a series that is as relevant now as it was a few years ago. I think a lot of those in power (in music) could learn a lot and take guidance from it. If you get chance to listen, then go here and you can hear the episodes. Completing my look at the sensational Laura Marling, one needs to look at her most-recent incarnation: as one-half of the terrific LUMP. The duo consists Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay. Their eponymous debut came out last year and, as you’d expect, reviews were hot. The duo has a natural chemistry and it was great hearing Marling in a new context. She did briefly work with Noah and the Whale before her first solo album, but LUMP is the first time she paired with another musician in such a collaborative and equal way.
Before concluding, I want to bring in an interview Marling and Lindsay gave with NME, where they discussed their collaboration:
“For a project as dreamy and cerebral as LUMP, its birthplace is an improbable one. On 11 June, 2016, Laura Marling and Tunng‘s Mike Lindsay met for the first time at a bowling alley inside The O2, while the former was supporting Neil Young on his UK arena tour. Just two days later, the pair were in the studio recording what would become a 32-minute collaborative album, and within the week Marling had recorded all her parts.
What did you like about each others’ work when you met each other?
Laura: “I’d been a Tunng fan – and early on in my career we’d intersected a couple of times but never really met. I didn’t know Mike was one of the main men behind Tunng.”
Mike: “I’ve been a fan of Laura’s for a long time. I have a memory of us playing at Cambridge Folk Festival together back once upon a year, and being blown away. I also saw her playing at Hop Farm Festival in 2010 and was quite impressed with the whistling… ‘Devil’s Spoke’ was a favourite of mine for a long time. It was just really nice to be able to meet Laura and ask to do something together”.
“Laura, you mentioned Kate Bush’s singing voice in a recent interview. Was that someone you were wanting to channel?
Laura: “Not consciously. I was surprised by that, actually, because I’d never consciously thought about a singing style, or emulating someone else’s. Obviously I was brought up on Joni Mitchell, so that’s how I learnt to sing. It was Mike’s direction actually – you had a few things in mind for what you wanted my voice to do, that you’d heard me do before, I guess?”
Mike: “Yeah – but actually, listening to what we’ve ended up with, I’ve never totally heard you do some of the things that you’re doing on the LUMP record. You go through all ranges of your vocal capacity and it changes from song to song. It’s quite special.”
What’s the future of LUMP?
Mike: “I hope there’s a future of LUMP… I guess we’ve gotta give him the right cuddles. Or her. See what the whispers are.”
Laura: “See how he takes to touring. Might not like it.”
Mike: “One step at a time. But I’m really enjoying it so far, we’ll see what happens.”
What about in your own separate capacities? What are your future plans with music?
Mike: “Tunng has got a new record coming out at the end of the year, which will be the original line-up for the first time since 2007. That’s quite exciting. This has been a wonderful way of getting back into sonic experimentation, and now there’s a Tunng record as well. That’s enough for me, really, this and that.”
Laura: “And I’m just this. I’m always writing, I always write, but there’s usually a point where I feel like I’ve turned a corner and the last record has ended. I haven’t turned that corner yet I don’t think – I’m still in ‘Semper Femina’ mode”.
Let’s hope there is another LUMP album, given the reception their debut received. Two years after Marling’s last solo album, I hope 2020 brings new material from her. She is one of those songwriters who does not rely on the pomp and build-up you get with others; teasing material and endlessly releasing singles. Instead, Marling is more traditional and is keener for us to hear the album and enjoy it as a single body. She is a wonderful artist and one who, annoyingly, gets better and better with each album – are there no limits to her talent?! I have ended this feature with a career-spanning playlist that demonstrates just how amazing and varied Marling is. One of the most imaginative, compelling and engaging songwriters in the world, you just know Marling will produce music…
IN THIS PHOTO: Laura Marling with Mike Lindsay (LUMP)/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images/Spotify
UNTIL her final breath.