Let’s hear it for the first classic of the crisis

TIM DE LISLE ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Laura Marling

Song For Our Daughter

Chrysalis/Partisan, out now

★★★★★

Quite a few albums that should have come out now have been postponed till the autumn. You can understand why, but it’s no use to the fans who have time to kill and a thirst for new music. So let’s hear it for Laura Marling, who took one look at lockdown and decided to bring her new record forward.

This Home Counties folk singer is a freshfaced veteran, just turned 30 and already on her seventh solo album. She was only 18 when she released her debut LP, and 21 when she won British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brits. I caught a glimpse of her that night, walking through the crowd, and she was a whiter shade of pale, more troubled than triumphant.

These days she’s more in control. Song For Our Daughter is addressed not to a real child but to the girls starting out now, or maybe to Marling’s younger self. And although it’s elegantly dressed, in a gentle strum and a shimmer of strings, the message is blunt: don’t take any nonsense from men. Two of the songs feature a word that’s almost unheard of in folk music – ‘bull **** ’.

The title track is a life lesson that feels more like a misery memoir. ‘With your clothes on the floor,’ Marling sings, ‘Taking advice from some old balding bore, You’ll ask yourself, did I want this at all?’ These are strong words, and she matches them with a haunting melody. It’s telling that eight of the ten songs here were written alone. Let’s hope that lockdown encourages more singers to go their own way. Marling is studying psychoanalysis, which generates endless material. But she doesn’t just look inwards: one track here was prompted by Robert Icke’s version of Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, for which Marling supplied the music; another is called The End Of The Affair, after the great novel by Graham Greene.

The best song of all, Blow By Blow, is inspired by a fellow songwriter: Paul McCartney. Marling wrote it on the piano because she’s less adept than on the guitar, which would force her to keep it simple. The result is a ballad McCartney would be proud of, all descending chords and piercing pauses. This strange period we’re living through has found its first classic album.