I first saw Laura Marling live 11 years ago, in the basement of a derelict hospital somewhere in east London. It was a liminal space; a Gothic manor where vines crawled through cracked glass and the veil between worlds could be disturbed by a drafty window. Marling was just 23 at the time, performing songs from her fourth album Once I Was An Eagle. Her presence seemed to fit the space perfectly: armed with just an acoustic guitar, she sang alone under a spotlight, still and ghostly. It was a darker time for her as a songwriter, and the lyrics were searing and sultry, capturing the disillusionment of young love and the frustration of repeated heartbreaks. In those early days, Marling’s songs were often characterised by critics as ‘wise beyond her years’ – as if they’d been transmitted from a divine source or through a leak in the collective unconscious – and these were no exception.
Once I Was An Eagle was followed in the decade after by a steady flow of other records, some solo, some collaborative. There was Short Movie, Sempur Feminina and Song For Our Daughter, which all deftly explored the introspections of contemporary womanhood. Marling went through multiple personal transformations during this time too; training as a yoga teacher, moving to Los Angeles (and back), working as a chef, an actor and an artist, and completing an MA in Psychoanalysis. More recently, she started her own Substack, a Jungian-esque study of songwriting and creativity, using the archetypes of the Tarot as starting points.
But Marling’s new record, Patterns In Repeat, charts one of the most significant shifts of her life so far: becoming a mother. Recorded entirely in her home alongside her newborn daughter, the songs are intimate and charged with a newfound, all-powerful empathy. What do we inherit from our parents, and what do we pass on? What desires are subjugated in the name of familial love? It’s the sound of an “icy” heart being cracked wide open, of an existence that is simultaneously expanding and contracting – and it has been widely praised as some of the best work of her career. “Following a youth spent desperately trying to understand what it is to be a woman, I am at the brow of the hill, with an entirely new and enormous perspective surrounding me,” she says.
Below, Laura Marling tells us more about what inspired the record.
Dominique Sisley: Patterns In Repeat feels much more open-hearted and moving than your other work. I don’t know whether that’s the lyrics, the lack of drums, the fact that you wrote it at such a pivotal point of your life ... Do you feel like it‘s a more emotional record?
Laura Marling: Yeah, open-hearted is probably the right way of putting it. I think it cracks something in your cold, icy soul when you have a child: you realise everyone started that way, which gives you a totally new perspective on people. I found it unbearable to listen to music just after my daughter was born because it was so powerful. I still find that sometimes: I put on Björk’s Hyperballad yesterday, and it’s so amazing, so bizarre, so feminine. I wasn’t that emotionally reactive to music before.
DS: I know you said you were quite ambivalent about motherhood before you had your daughter.
LM: Yeah. It was a male friend of mine who’s a very successful director [who changed my mind]. He had kids when he was really young, and had to work hard to make it work. I was having dinner with him – he’s very forthright, and I like it when people feel like they can’t offend me – and he just said, “When are you gonna have kids?” I said some generic answer about how it might affect my creativity, and he just said, “It’s ridiculous. You’ll never regret it, and you won’t ever ask yourself that question again.” I think I was pregnant the next month.
DS: A lot of art around motherhood recently has been about ‘honesty’, and has therefore painted a brutal picture of it. Do you feel there’s not enough joyful or positive art to counter that?
LM: I definitely do and I understand why, because hearing about the traumatic times tickles a dark sensationalism in people. Also, if you have a dark or unexpected experience of motherhood, it takes up way more mental space than a pleasant one – not to belittle that. I was so surprised by how completely diametrically opposite my experience of motherhood was, and there are lots of factors to that, that become immediately political and complicated. So, in some ways, it’s just best to keep your trap shut.
I wouldn’t say that my creativity or my songwriting got better, but the circumstances around it became more perfectly aligned with getting stuff done and not second-guessing myself. Also, this new crack in the icescape provoked perfect circumstances for songwriting.
DS: Do you think you were an icy person before?
LM: I had a lot of ambivalence about lots of things. I still do. My sisters would say I’m made of ice – I mean, they love me, but I’m not very emotional compared to them. [Laughs].
“I think it cracks something in your cold, icy soul when you have a child: you realise everyone started that way, which gives you a totally new perspective on people” – Laura Marling
DS: Patterns In Repeat is also about looking back to your parents and what we inherit from them, the cycles we repeat. One track on the album – Looking Back – was written by your dad, right?
LM: My dad wrote that when he was in his late twenties before he met my mum. There’s a whole world of experience that exists before your parents made you. I always wanted to know what their motivating desires were and what was subjugated in the name of family. But then, when I had a child, I realised that it’s necessary for them to prevent you from understanding that so that they can get on and raise a family. It’s an almost conservative turn: you give up certain freedoms and desires to secure the path for your children.
DS: You said you wanted to explore “the agonies that run down the matriarchal line on both sides”. How did your mum come into play?
LM: My mum has had a very difficult life. She was abandoned after the war, put into foster care and then adopted. It’s miraculous to me that she brought up three girls in the way that she did. My dad also had a very contentious relationship with his mother, who died very young. But in a more universal sense, I think those older generations had to live through the beginning of sex capitalism, where women were suddenly expected to do all the jobs [motherhood and career], be everything, or give up one kind of freedom for another. So much of what it was to be a woman then was misunderstood or kept under wraps.
DS: You’ve experienced a lot of transformation in your life. What would you say was your most meaningful or profound moment?
LM: I think the defining transformative moment of my life was taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Up until I did that, when I was 22 or 23, I was very cautious. I found it very difficult to speak unless I was very confident in who I was speaking to. Then I took mushrooms in the desert and I couldn’t stop speaking. I remember when I realised there was something maybe quite wrong with me: I went to an art museum with my friend Gil, and he was crying looking at the paintings. I was like, “What are you crying for?” and I realised I hadn’t actually cried myself for about four years. He was like, “That’s really bad.”
DS: What happened on the trip?
LM: It was like the middle of the night in the desert in Joshua Tree – God, imagine how many people have told this exact story – but I was completely in sync with this tree, I was breathing at the same time as it. And there was a bird that just kept coming up to me after, [it was] so comfortable in my presence. I just got a very profound sense of effectiveness with the universe.
DS: So an ego death?
LM: I had an ego death, and that is what ended up sending me to psychoanalysis because I found it very difficult to reintegrate after that. Really, very, very difficult. And that’s why I ended up moving back from LA. I had an amazing time there until it got really dark.
DS: The way you talk about ambition is really interesting because you so often say you don’t have any.
LM: I have a personal ambition to be good at what I do, yes, but things that other people value, I guess I don’t value. Like, I don’t think people want fame. I don’t think people want to work incredibly, incredibly hard to make lots and lots of money because it’s too much of a give-and-take.
DS: You don’t think people want that?
LM: I don’t think people truly want that. If I worked a lot harder, I could be in a different place, but I don’t want to be doing my vocal warm-ups on a running machine. I just don’t want to do that. It’s not the kind of life I want. So I do have ambition, but it’s ambition for a milder form of success.
DS: It sounds like you have always been quite secure in not needing external validation.
LM: It’s why people would accuse me of having a cold heart, right? It doesn’t do a lot for me, and it never has. Maybe because I got it at 16, and you realise this isn’t actually all it’s cracked up to be, and it’s not you. I’d rather be liked and appreciated for me as a person. But then I can say that because I have a little platform, and I do get validated on a certain level.
“I’m not trying to diss Ed Sheeran, he seems like a real nice guy. But bots live among us, and powerfully successful things are already done in cardboard, and we seem to have accepted calling that art” – Laura Marling
DS: There’s been a lot of talk recently about how marketing has become a much more significant part of the artistic process, sometimes even bigger than the art itself. Is this something you think or worry about?
LM: I have worried about it, and then I find that it’s a waste of my time to rail against it. I said in an interview the other day that Ed Sheeran is as good as an AI bot at songwriting. I’m not trying to diss Ed Sheeran, he seems like a real nice guy. But 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 graft 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.
DS: I guess creating a persona like that can be seen as artistry in itself, right?
LM: Yes. Well, there’s the great quote, “Sometimes wanting it bad enough is an art in itself.” That‘s really true. And I remember there was an interview with Joanna Newsom – it must have been the last interview she gave, because I haven’t read one since – where she made a very vague but highly intelligent criticism of Lady Gaga, and she was so right. Look at the world we live in now compared to then, and what is now considered acceptable now.
DS: Consumerism and music go hand-in-hand now.
LM: You can put it into your lyrics, or anywhere you like. People are like, “Oh, wow, she got an H&M deal.”
DS: Finally, creatively speaking: what makes you feel dead and alive?
LM: I heard a Nick Cave interview the other day where he was saying that whenever he makes an album, he always feels that he’s dying. I so relate to that feeling. You feel the weight of its permanence so profoundly, like, this will now represent me for the rest of my life. It feels a little bit like dying, or that you can get it so wrong that you might die. So I find it quite scary, the process of making an album. And when I was making Once I Was An Eagle, before my ‘ego death’, I found that performing that album every night was really draining me. So I feel very aware of not producing something that can do more harm to me or to other people who are listening to it. I feel like I have more control now and I am generally quite careful with my work. I try to be careful with my words and what the sentiment of a song is: you can touch the ugliness of difficult emotions, but not with vindictiveness.
Patterns In Repeat by Laura Marling is out now.