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.
The emotion conveyed was one I understood well, but one I had shied away from writing about when I became a mother. The year our twin daughters were born, EBTG recorded the album Temperamental, and there is no mention of babies at all. Instead, Ben wrote about being out in clubs (he was DJing a lot at the time) while I wrote about post-punk suburban violence (“Hatfield 1980”), the decline of a pop career (“Downhill Racer”), and the urgency of living your life while there is still time (“No Difference”). The pressure of new parenthood hangs over all these themes, but there are no direct references.
Content from our partners
