FEATURE:
My Favourite Album of 2020
Laura Marling – Song for Our Daughter
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QUITE a few lists are being published….
PHOTO CREDIT: Justin Tyler Close
collating the best albums of 2020. It is providing inspiration for Lockdown Playlists but, more than anything, it makes me wonder where my favourite album of the year features. The album in question is Laura Marling’s Song for Our Daughter. It is the seventh studio artist from an artist who has not put a foot wrong since she came onto the scene! It is amazing to think about Marling’s consistency and just what she has accomplished even though she is thirty. It is wonderful to think how far she can go and how good she will get! Song for Our Daughter was released on 10th April, and it was an especially tough and strange time where we were in lockdown and it was right near the start of the pandemic starting in the U.K. Recorded between Marling's home studio, London, Monnow Valley Studio, Wales and Ethan Johns' Three Crows studio, Song for Our Daughter sound remarkably consistent and beautiful. I think it is one of Marling’s most moving and diverse set of songs. I know many publications will put Song for Our Daughter in their top-ten - and I will be curious to see, in such a competitive year, how many adjudge it the very best of 2020. I think this year has been an incredible one for music considering everything going on, and I know Laura Marling had different ideas for the release of the album and she would have wanted it to be out in the world when we were all together.
She has performed some streamed gigs from her home and she has also provided guitar tutorials. She has definitely been keeping busy this year and, right at the start of the crisis, it was nice having her album out there. Many artists delayed the release of their album by weeks and months, but Marling felt that people needed to hear Song for Our Daughter. I am going to bring in some interview segments from this year where Marling was promoting the album but, when it came to reviews for Song for Our Daughter, they were some of the most impassioned and extraordinary of her career! In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“If Laura Marling's Grammy-nominated standout, Semper Femina, signified a mid-career watershed, her 2020 follow-up, Song for Our Daughter, finds the Londoner moving through a subtler, though equally vital evolution replete with sharpened observations and a gripping sense of vulnerability. Loosely inspired by Maya Angelou's 2008 essay collection Letter to My Daughter, the album's ten tracks act as an exquisite outpouring of accumulated wisdom, pain, and the type of detailed personal narratives at which Marling excels. Co-produced with longtime foil Ethan Johns, though bearing a similar instrumental palette to her previous Blake Mills-produced outing, the largely acoustic framework here is neatly woven with spare, elegant instrumentation leaving little to hide behind as she rakes the cooling embers of her own past, engages warily with the present, and imagines possible futures her fictional child might one day face. The rugged folk-rock jangle of "Held Down" and the buoyant pop paean to individualism "Strange Girl" deliver some of the more immediate thrills here, but it's the marvelous centerpiece "Fortune" that sets the highest bar. Adorned by a winsome string arrangement and her nimble guitar picking, Marling's opening salvo of "you took out that money that your mama had saved, she told me she kept it for running away" sets up a multigenerational tale of escape and misfortune that plays like a late-career highlight from a legacy act gazing backward. At just 30 years old and with seven albums to her credit, Marling's songwriting has been honed to a level of literate maturity that few artists achieve in their careers”.
If you have not got a copy of Song for Our Daughter then go and get one, as it a remarkable album full of the very best songwriting you will hear. I have always loved Marling’s work, but I think her voice, playing and writing is at its peak on Song for Our Daughter. When they reviewed the album, The Independent noted the following:
“The title of Marling’s last record, 2017’s worldly Semper Femina (Latin for “always a woman”), refers to Virgil’s line about how fickle and ever-changing women are. On Song For Our Daughter, Marling channels this with a thrilling defiance, right as she turns 30 – a period of transition in itself – and offers her best work to date.
Marling’s previous albums have been grounded in evocative storytelling, her airy meditations on love, age and experience set against pastoral guitar landscapes. Not for nothing was she hailed, on more than one occasion, the voice of a generation. More subtle than her previous works, these new songs are as fragmented and beautiful as stained glass.
“Blow by Blow” is an exquisite lament – a poetical anatomy of a broken relationship. Piano chords tumble with sparse tenderness. Cellos rise and fall like blossoms carried in the wind. Marling’s vocals – soft and wounded – wrestle with grief. Yet this is not a “sad” album. She strides with purpose on the jubilant “Alexandra”, inspired in part by Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra’s Leaving”. Between periods of solace at London’s British Library and living with family, she now rejoices in her social awkwardness: “Stay alone, be brave,” she urges on the good-humoured shuffle “Strange Girl”.
By now fans are more than familiar with her virtuosic guitar playing and the way she can skip from twangy, Seventies Americana to the deft finger-picking of trad-English folk. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about our daughter growing old/ All of the bulls**t that she might be told,” she sings, as violins courtesy of Rob Moose (The National, Bon Iver) make this in part an elegy for her own experiences. What a marvel this album is”.
Respect has to go to Marling for releasing an album like Song for Our Daughter when she did, as it would have been easy to shelve it until later in the year and see how the pandemic played out. It must have been a tough decision. In an NME interview from April, we learn about that release conflict, in addition to some of the influences on Song for Our Daughter:
“I’ve never been at home long enough to grow anything or have a dog, and now I want all of those things,” she reasons, considering the possible benefits of being largely housebound for the foreseeable future. “I’ve been sending emails out to adoption agencies. I’ll take anything, but the fantasy pet is a mongrel with a missing leg,” she says. “I want a dog with a story.”
Though written and recorded well before the global pandemic, it’s a soothing panacea for troubling times. The record sees Marling play with pop melody more than ever before, losing none of her uniqueness in the process. “It’s still not in any great danger of becoming mainstream… or successful!” she says – quite wrongly, we might add – with a self-deprecating laugh. “But I guess it is more poppy for me.”
Marling was originally set for an August album reveal, but bucked the trend of a panicked industry – countless release dates have been pushed back due to COVID-19 – and pulled hers forward instead: “I only decided to do it 10 days ago. It’s so crazy. But I feel like I’m forever sitting on an album that hasn’t been released yet. It’s such a long process, because you want to give people time to set it up properly. People want to do a good job for it, but I like to get them out whenever they’re done.”
At 36 minutes and 10 tracks long, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ is her shortest but most textured album. There’s the ever-present influence of Joni Mitchell’s bright and breezy acoustic guitar (‘Alexandra’), as well as the layered folk rock of Crosby, Stills and Nash (‘Strange Girl’) and even Paul McCartney’s bewitching simplicity (‘For You’).
Of the latter she says: “I listened to ‘Jenny Wren’. It’s from 2005, on a Paul McCartney album [‘Chaos And Creation In The Backyard’] you wouldn’t think twice about – not to be harsh – but it is the most astonishingly beautiful song. I suddenly realised that there was an entire catalogue that I hadn’t paid attention to that was full of these stunningly beautiful songs. I’d never thought he was bad, but I’d overlooked him, certainly.”
This time around, Marling got stuck into production almost as fully as she did with 2015’s entirely self-produced ‘Short Movie’ album, creating sumptuous arrangements in the studio she built in her basement last year. “I indulged in lushness a bit more than I have done previously,” she says. “Lots of backing vocals and beautiful, beautiful strings”
In a difficult year, I have been listening to music more than ever, and I have been provided with wisdom, comfort, strength and company from so many artists. There are so many fascinating stories and moments on Song for Our Daughter that means you keep coming back. Some tracks hit you when you first hear them, whereas others take a bit more time to reveal their full potency and meaning. I want to source from another interview, as Laura Marling discusses some of the themes on the album in addition to the #MeToo movement:
“Song For Our Daughter, an assertive take on loss, remorse and mistreatment, is magnificent. Blending the bucolic folk of Semper Femina with brief spurts of the Dylan-esque speak-singing she wryly adopted on Short Movie, it is sophisticated but unselfconscious. Though not quite as rigid a concept album as some critics have taken it to be, it contemplates the kind of world Marling would like to help build for her potential daughter. She says it is a “piece of me”.
“I think all of my output has been an evolving relationship with what it is to be a woman,” she explains, “and now that I’m 30, I feel a new phase of my life has been entered. I’ve sort of been waiting for that phase of my life – where I can stop being in my twenties – for my whole adult life. And it has changed my perspective in the way that I look at my younger self. I think about what I would have liked to have been protected from – which is a self-propelling maternal instinct, because in many ways, I’m just talking about a younger version of myself.”
It certainly has its moments – the lullaby-like “For You” expresses a kind of joy Marling rarely allows into her music, her accent closer to her speaking voice than it’s been for years – as if to close the gap between person and performer. But if the story of Lucretia speaks to the times we’re living in, then so, too, does Song For Our Daughter. “With your clothes on the floor/ taking advice from some old balding bore,” she sings on that title track, “You’ll ask yourself, ‘Did I want this at all?’”
It paints a complicated picture. Some women, says Marling, are bred to be obedient. Others are encouraged to not “take s***”. “There’s this huge scale of what your life experience is and how that contributes to how you would conduct yourself in a difficult situation. #MeToo was interesting, because there were some very clearly litigious things that were brought up in an industry – similar to music – that’s full of very difficult nuance about how business is done and transacted. And the law doesn’t work in favour of people who’ve been traumatised. Weinstein going to jail is the most satisfying outcome, and anybody who can be prosecuted should be prosecuted, but we must also pay attention to the gap in the law”.
Go and stream or buy Song for Our Daughter, as it is a marvellous album – and it is my pick for the best of 2020. I am going to watch closely to see where Marling heads from here and what direction her work takes. Song for Our Daughter is, as I noted, her most diverse, and there is a blend of some more Pop elements together with her Folk roots. Having not long turned thirty and in a new stage of life, there is this sort of consideration of motherhood and new responsibility – a song/album, as it were, for a hypothetical daughter. Maybe by the time the next album comes out Marling might be a mother, or perhaps this album was a way of addressing questions and thoughts that have been on her mind for a while. There is a lot to enjoy and discover from the album so, if you are new to Song for Our Daughter, give Laura Marling’s exceptional album…
A good spin.