The Chronicle

I’ve enjoyed getting older. The people I looked up to were always in their 40s

Laura Marling explains to ALEX GREEN how taking a musical sabbatical allowed her to produce perhaps her finest album

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MUCH has changed in the life of Laura Marling since she last released an album. But instead of looking inward, the Berkshire-bred folkie looks to the outside world in her latest work.

“You start in your late teens as a kind of self-obsessed narcissist,” explains Laura.

“I think that’s the right way to be in your late teens – to believe that the world revolves around you in some way. And then in your mid-20s you’re like ‘Wow – I’m a very, very small fish in a massive pond of experience that everybody has shared’.”

Laura is explaining how her perception of the world – and herself – has shifted in recent years. In February she celebrated her 30th birthday – “a non-event,” she says blithely.

But she is enjoying the ageing process. Critics have painted Laura as an old soul. Perhaps they are finally right.

Since departing Berkshire at 16 to pursue music in London, she has lived more lives than most.

She spent her early days in London’s awkwardly-titled nu-folk scene, singing backing vocals for Noah And The Whale, before recruiting an early iteration of Mumford And Sons as her band. There were awards and nomination­s and praise from critics and fans alike, and a stint living in Los Angeles.

After her last album, 2017’s Semper Femina, Laura decided to take a musical sabbatical.

She left her record label and management, wrote for the theatre director Robert Icke, took a masters in psychoanal­ysis and formed a duo called Lump with Mike Lindsay from Tunng.

“I’ve always had an interest in psychoanal­ysis, since I was a patient of it for many years,” she divulges.

Song For Our Daughter, her seventh album, is the product of all this.

“I’ve enjoyed getting older so far,” she explains.

“The people I looked up to were always in their 40s and I feel like the closer I get to my 40s, the more authority I have,” she laughs.

We speak on the phone before Laura releases Song For Our Daughter with just a few days’ notice, and earlier than planned.

“Usually you wait a really long time to put it out. Usually it’s at least six months, which is torturous for me,” she chuckles.

“So this is nice – this is a nice alternativ­e way of doing it.”

For Laura, life has not changed dramatical­ly under lockdown.

She still has access to her studio, tucked in the basement of the north London home she shares with her boyfriend and her sister.

“There’s a little bit of a battle for privacy among us all,” she quips.

She reads, listens to music, studies and hosts virtual guitar tutorials of her own songs several times a week over

Instagram Live.

Laura moved to

Silver Lake in Los

Angeles around 2013 to record an album, before relocating back to London a year later.

“It’s been very nice,” she says of returning to the UK.

“I did my time away from my family, establishe­d my own identity, and by my family, I mean my family and friends.

“I’ve done my time, I think America was getting ever more sinister as the years were going by.

“It’s continuing on that trajectory so I feel very lucky and grateful to be in London and away from that. It’s nice.”

As part of her sabbatical, she took a commission from Icke in 2017, to write the feature song to his adaptation of Mary Stuart, starring Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson at the Almeida in London.

“I didn’t know much about him, but my theatre friends absolutely lost their s*** when they found out I was meeting him. Every single actor I knew was begging me to try and get them an audition.”

The pair worked together again on Hamlet, again at the Almeida, which starred Andrew Scott (before he played Fleabag’s Hot Priest).

They are now good friends and Icke lives “just down the road”.

Living in London, Laura swapped the solitary life of the road for what she describes as “an energetic pack”.

“You’re around people all the time, observing them and listening to what’s going on in their lives,” she says gleefully. “Whereas in previous albums, I’ve either been on the road on my own, or living in LA on my own – or whatever. I think this album is rooted more in my interest and in everybody’s internal passions. “The realisatio­n that people fall in love secretly or they have things that they grieve that were never made verbal and given an external form.

“Everyone has these huge worlds inside them and that’s been an interestin­g thing to contemplat­e.”

■ Song For Our Daughter is out now.

 ??  ?? Laura Marling is enjoying being back in the UK, even if it is under lockdown
Laura Marling is enjoying being back in the UK, even if it is under lockdown

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