A songwriter in lockdown: “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel…”

TOM PINNOCK

A FOLLOW-UP to this spring’s Song For Our Daughter may be a little way off, explains Laura Marling. “If I’m on the road for an extended period of time, I tend to have written an album by the time I get back,” she says. “Obviously that’s been completely scuppered by coronavirus. When I’m at home, I play the guitar but I don’t really feel the need to write - I mean, I’m at home, I’ve got nothing to miss.”

For now, though, there’s her extensive back catalogue to enjoy, and it’s this body of work that the songwriter is taking us through here; from her first studio experiences to orchestral arrangements for three bass guitars, via her own personal highpoint, 2013’s Once I Was An Eagle: “It’s just one of those things, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Along the way, Marling ponders her time in Los Angeles, being one half of Lump and her mission as a solo artist today. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel,” she says. “As much as I love Blake Mills’ production on Semper Femina - and I would take that any day - really it’s about whether I’m a good songwriter. That’s all I’m really interested in.”

Marling in 2010, at the time of I Speak Because I Can

ALAS, I CANNOT SWIM

VIRGIN, 2008

Marling’s debut, produced by Noah And The Whale’s Charlie Fink

We had four weeks at Eastcote Studios, two weeks doing my record and then a further two weeks back to back doing the Noah And The Whale record. We laid down the bass, drums, guitar and vocal all at once, and then we did overdubs - this is the same for all albums I’ve done, pretty much. My dad ran a recording studio which shut down when I was quite small, but I remember growing up around all of that outboard gear at home. So I guess I was slightly more familiar with the studio than the average 17-year-old, but still it was my first proper session. These were all my first songs, written from the age of 16, 17. There was a batch of songs before that that were on an EP, “London Town” - I didn’t like them very much by the time I got to making this. I haven’t listened to this for a long while; I very rarely play any of those songs live, so it’s a bit of a distant memory to me now. And the production was very much of the time, I guess, that ‘new folk’ world - glockenspiels and banjos and whatever - which is good, that’s what it was supposed to be then. I don’t really think of this as part of my catalogue.