When Laura Marling gave birth to her first child – a daughter – in February 2023, she felt “psychedelically high”. Everything around her took on greater intensity; even the small daily chores of life imbued with new cosmic import. Walking to the supermarket to buy sanitary pads on a glowing red winter’s evening, Marling marvelled at the world: “this amazing place full of people who were born”. She felt more emotional listening to music – sometimes finding it unbearable – and was drawn to the grandeur and sentimentality of classic movie musical soundtracks: West Side Story and The Sound of Music. In her 16-year career as a songwriter and performer (her first record, Alas I Cannot Swim, was released days after her 18th birthday, and described by the Guardian as “unnervingly grown-up”), Marling has sometimes been called “aloof” – her own sisters, she claims, would say she was “made of ice”. But, as she told one interviewer, “I think it cracks something in your cold, icy soul when you have a child.” This new “crack in the icescape” provided a different way of songwriting.
Marling, now 34, spent the first eight months of her daughter’s life at home, “bouncing a BabyBjörn and playing guitar all day”, and the result is Patterns in Repeat, an album written while looking her child in the eye. It’s her most “open-hearted” record yet – intimate, domestic, but orchestral and existential too; containing all the quietness of early parenthood and its big, expansive emotions. Its “patterns” are the day-to-day rhythms of family life and the more fundamental ways of being, thinking and feeling handed down from parents to their children. It’s both an album about the life-altering experience of new motherhood, and a continuation of themes of Marling’s earlier work – female identity, generational inheritance, buried desires, ageing and mortality. Announcing the record, Marling wrote: “Now, here we are, 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.”
A run of five gigs at the Church of St John-at-Hackney in east London to mark the album’s release made the parallels across Marling’s body of work – and the eerie maturity of her early records – strikingly clear. On 30 October, Marling, dressed simply in a brown shirt and jeans, stood alone on the stage of the minimalist, whitewashed Anglican church with orange-glowing Tiffany lamps dotted around her, and performed to a reverent, silent audience. (Marling is used to played in such venues: on a UK tour in 2011 she performed only in cathedrals.) The performance was split into three sections – in the first, Marling sang and played a selection of her back catalogue, with its complex, finger-picked guitar melodies, unaccompanied. Though her performance style was deliberately understated, her ethereal voice – richer, warmer and more robust than ever – rang out through the church with outsized power.
There’s an improvisational quality to Marling’s live performance – a change of melody here, a new lyric there – as if she were reinterpreting old classics (and several of her songs do deserve classic status). She opened with the suite of four thrumming, menacing songs that begin her fourth album Once I Was An Eagle (2013), united by a repeating raga-inspired guitar melody and brooding, defiant lyrics on society’s expectations of women, intergenerational frailties and the unconscious search to replicate familiar family dynamics in romantic relationships. After singing the caustic opening lyric of “I Was An Eagle” (“So your grandmother sounds to me / A woman I would be proud to be / And you say she reminds you of me? / Every little boy is so naïve”) Marling emphatically spoke the song’s chorus, as if it were a promise: “I will not be a victim of romance”. On “You Know”, she made one change of phrasing – “And bless all those mothers who do all they can / Just to take their faults out of the line / I might not know what that’s like but I’m glad that you know” became “I now know what that’s like and I’m so glad that you know” – to a small whoop. She sang three songs in a row from her prophetic 2020 album Song For Our Daughter, with its insights, reassurances and warnings about womanhood offered to a then-imaginary daughter.
But the emotional crescendo of the performance was the songs from Patterns in Repeat, which Marling performed in its entirety, in order, joined on stage by a string quartet and an all-female choir. As she sang the opening line of the first track, “Child of Mine” – “You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen / Life is slowing down but it’s still bitchin’” – the audience gave another little cheer. These songs, particularly the singles “Child of Mine”, “Patterns” and “Caroline”, sound ecstatic and haunting. Though they speak to the specifics of the experience of parenthood, they also seem to exist outside of any one context: the grammar of “Patterns” flattens past, present and future, and sounds more hopeful for it. Marling seemed endearingly anxious while performing the piano ballad “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can” – it’s not her usual instrument – but it only added to the song’s sweetness. “Patterns in Repeat”, the album’s closing track, not only calls back to “Patterns” but the suite from Once I Was An Eagle, as Marling interpolates the melody from “Breathe” in the lines: “I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me / I want you to have a piece of my maternal flame / Part of me, eternity, a tolerance for pain”.
The choir remained for Marling’s 2015 song “Daisy” – about a single parent and sex worker living unconventionally by the sea, swelling on the mantra-like chorus: “I think that you look at her wrong / I think you look at us all wrong / A woman alone is not a woman undone” – and Eagle’s soulful heartbreak ballad “Once”. But Marling ended the show as she began, alone on stage, singing an upbeat, staccato, electric version of Song for Our Daughter’s “For You”: “I drew pictures of you / Long before I met you / Just a fragment of my mind / I had called out for you / Almost every night”. Her voice called out: clear and crisp, unsentimental, unadorned.
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America