LAURA MARLING - NEWS
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UK singer/songwriter Joe Hicks, in an nterview with Alan Corr of RTE, said that his favourite song right now is "Soothing by Laura Marling - a mesmerising piece of music that has so much texture I swear you can reach out and touch the sound coming out of the speakers."
Marling's song "Only the Strong" was featured in the tenth episode of Michael Alaimo's Amazon Prime series BALLARD. The show is based on the series of novels by Michael Connolly, and Maggie Q stars as LAPD Detective Renée Ballard.
Justin Tyler directed a short film for Marling's seventh album, SONG FOR OUR DAUGHTER. The video uses short snippets of various tracks and vignettes, broken up with sections of poetry. Owen Meyers on Pitchfork wrote: "Marling does away with her previous record’s occasional blues-rock grit and peels her sound back to its gleaming bones: pristine acoustic guitar, textural hums, a metronome click. She doesn’t need much else to frame her quartz pendant of a voice, which can reach Alpine altitudes...Marling has described Song for Our Daughter as a rumination on modern femininity, and her tendency to leave lyrical narratives open and unfinished adds an evocative elasticity to her new music."
Tracey Thorn wrote in The New Statesman: "Laura Marling made me cry the other day. I was on my morning walk with her new album – mentioned in these pages last week – in my headphones. The track 'Child of Mine' began with the sound of a baby gurgling. The guitar part started up and I idly wondered, 'Is that baby on Laura’s lap, or in a Moses basket at her feet?' and then suddenly there were tears streaming down my face. It was this line that got me – 'Last night in your sleep you started crying/I can’t protect you there though I keep trying'. And it got me, as they say, right in the feels."
INTERVIEWS AND REVIEWS
Tom Turner reviewed Marling's 6 March performance at Albert Hall in Manchester:
TRACKLIST:
1. Take the Night Off / I Was an Eagle / You Know / Breathe 2. - Tap at My Window
3. - Nouel 4. - Fortune 5. - Song for Our Daughter 6. - The End of the Affair
7. - Goodbye England (Covered in Snow) 8. - Child of Mine 9. - Patterns
10. - Your Girl 11. No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can 12. - The Shadows
13. - Caroline 14. - Looking Back 15. - Lullaby 16. - Patterns in Repeat
17. - What He Wrote 18. - Daisy 19. - Once 20. - For You
Hannah Ewens reviewed Marling's 29 October 2024 show at Hackney Church in London for The Guardian: "This show is all about her new record, Patterns in Repeat: songs about motherhood and domesticity that are her best in a decade. The new material blooms from the centre of the setlist, as Marling is joined by a string ensemble and a local all-female choir. Your Girl, a meditative song on love and loss, feels particularly transcendent as the choral vocals fill the church, their ethereality set against Marling’s more tangible timbre. It is thrilling when artists outperform their own records live, adding intuitive flourishes that sound as if they should have always been there. Marling’s improvisation, when it comes, consistently has the gentle force to break hearts."
Australian music journalist Bernard Zeul called the album "quiet and measured...lightly enhanced with occasional strings and backing vocals, and Laura Marling’s voice central, calm and intimate" and went on to say: "The first 'evening song' after this interlude, Caroline, takes its musical cues from early L.Cohen (finger-picked acoustic rolling through; strings presenting just to the side; the melody lightly resting on top), its lyrical cues from mid L.Cohen (a woman named and curiosity sparked; memory touched with regret and a sliver of amusement; and a brutal line delivered with grace), and its understanding from late L.Cohen (a story that seeks to hold the past at arm’s length shows its workings; forgiveness is available; humour is at hand)."
Liam Hess of British Vogue asked Marling how recording at home affected things. She responded: "What that experience revealed to me was that it’s actually really good to have no other input until you’re absolutely sure what you want, so that you can dictate exactly what you want. Making an album is, in its nature, a collaborative process, so you have to find a way to get what you want done without upsetting other people’s very worthy input. And that was much heightened by having a baby and having the restrictions of not being able to leave the house, really. And I enjoyed those restrictions, like having to put her on the floor when I was recording. This is when she was very little, so she couldn’t move around. So there’s a lot of incidental noise on the record of babbling babies and dogs shaking their collar and things like that."
LYRICS AND VOCABLULARY
An article in Get Reading cites a report by The Trinity Mirror Data Group on word usage by songwriters which says that, over her first three albums, Marling employed some 1200 different words, and employed the pronoun 'I' 337 times. The pronoun 'you' was used 185 times.
Area 33 calculates that, in all the songs on Marling's ten albums (including LUMP and ANIMAL), the pronoun 'I' is used 836 times, and the pronoun 'you' is employed 462 times.
SEMPER FEMINA
In an article for The Line of Best Fit, Kim Hillyard wrote: "Marling self-funded Semper Femina’s creation before selling the finished album to independent label services, offering all the mechanisms of a label but allowing her to release the album under her own offshoot, More Alarming. Why the name? 'Oh. I always thought it would be a good name for a punk band if I was in one,' she smiles. 'Laura Marling, more alarming.'"
SHELVED ALBUM
Following the release of Marvin Gay's posthumous album 'You're The Man', Alexandra Pollard asked Marling how she felt about previously unpublished music being released in that way. Marling replied: "It makes me think of the album that I shelved, and how crap it is, and how much of a product of a shitty time in my life it was. I wouldn’t want to inflict that on anyone."
THE ARTISTIC PROCESS
Asked how marketing influences the artistic process, Marling told Dominique Sisley of AnOther: "...bots live among us, and powerfully successful things are already done in cardboard, and we seem to have accepted calling that art. What’s interesting is the use of the word artist: I didn’t call myself an artist for a long time. Now I quite comfortably do, because I know I put in so much craft into my craft without allowing any outside influence to come in. But when I hear what are essentially shiny plastic packages, assembled by a marketing team, call themselves artists, I find that really strange. But we all participate in that language now."
In Isle Of Noises: Conversations With Great British Songwriters by Daniel Rachel, Marling was asked if she records 'little ideas' and then builds from them. "No," said Marling, "it's all from memory. I'm a complete technophobe. Sometimes if I finish a song very quickly then I write it down because I'll definitely forget it the next day. But I can't read or write music so I do write down chords and stuff.".
CONCERT DATES
2024
- 29 & 30 October - Hackney Church - London
- 1 & 2 November - Hackney Church - London
- 10 November - 2:30pm & 10:00pm - Bowery Ballroom - NYC
- 11 & 12 November - Bowrey Ballroom, New York City
2025
7 & 8 February - Montalban Theatre, Hollywood, CA- 5 March - Albert Hall - Manchester, UK
- 6 March - Albert Hall - Manchester, UK
PATTERNS IN REPEAT
Her eighth album, PATTERNS IN REPEAT, was released on 25 October 2024 and is available on most streaming services. The album can be purchased in MP3, CD, or Vinyl format from Bandcamp, Amazon Music, and from most record outlets. Marling described how the cover art for 'Patterns in Repeat' was made to Greg MacLean of Wallpaper. "It's oil pastel, and it's done with compass and ruler. It's quite a laborious process. You get the expanding dimensions from the centre of the circle. And you start to use the compass in whatever way you want, symmetrically. Then you draw out whatever picture is appearing in the centre."
MERCHANDISE
"Marling’s prints have become something of a cottage industry – well, a terraced-Victorian-house-in-East-London industry – for the artist. She’s almost completed a series of prints based on all of her albums, the only one not tackled so far being Alas, I Cannot Swim...'I have always been very into Tarot,' she says of the thematic connection linking her fresh visual interpretations of her musical back-catalogue. 'So I was really into how much Easter-eggy imagery you could get into one picture. Then I just started building them in this Tarot format, with one representing each album.'"
---- Greg MacLean - 'Anything I put out into the world, I want to be a prayer': musician Laura Marling on eschewing traditional merch for tarot-inspired prints'
REVERSAL OF THE MUSE
Some years ago, Marling did a series of podcasts called REVERSAL OF THE MUSE, which she says "...began as conversations between friends about female creativity. In reversing the muse it became an experiment. As a small part of the global conversation about women in the arts, it became an obsession. It occurred to me that in 10 years of making records I had only come across two female engineers working in studios. Starting from my experience of being a woman I began to ask myself what difference it might have made had I had more women around, if any. I wanted to know why progress has been so slow in this area and what effect it would have on music."
GUITAR TUTORIALS
In 2013, Quentin Ames published a series of four video tutorials on how to play the first four songs on Marling's album "I Was an Eagle". Above is the first in the series.
Launched 10 November 2024
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