LAURA MARLING PAGES

Tom Turner reviewed Marling's 6 March performance at Albert Hall in Manchester:

In her final show before taking a break to have her second child, Laura Marling illuminates Manchester’s Albert Hall in an ornate display...In a world dominated by screens, social media and technology, not a phone is in sight, with each punter truly living in the moment. Tonight truly feels like an occasion, each person seems utterly enthralled by every word that leaves Marling’s lips and settles in the air, left to hang and permeate each individual. During the song ‘Caroline’, lights shoot into the audience as Marling effortlessly slips in and out of a beautiful falsetto. She calmly commands the room, as the sound of strings combines with guitar to create a gorgeous sonic landscape for the listener to dive into.

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School of Song has announced that Laura Marling will lead their next Songwriting Workshop beginning 23 March.

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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."

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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."

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Hannah Ewens reviewed Marling's 29 October 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."

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No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, wrote: "Patterns in Repeat was inspired by the birth of Marling’s daughter and the singer-songwriter’s initiation into motherhood, but still covers broad thematic ground. Throughout the venture, Marling reflects on her life and the world into which she has brought her child, translating myriad questions, memories, hopes, and anxieties into a series of beguiling yet accessible songs. Opener 'Child of Mine' is a guitar-and-vocal tribute to family ('You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen'), 'slowing down', and the Edenic nature of childhood ('Everything you want is in your reach right now'). Marling’s voice is relaxed yet compelling. The track sets the stage for her forays down various descriptive and narrative rabbit holes."

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In an article titled 'Anything I put out into the world, I want to be a prayer': musician Laura Marling on eschewing traditional merch for tarot-inspired prints' Greg MacLean wrote: "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.'"

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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."

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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."