Negotiating fame, the f(olk)-word, then the “dark nightmare” of LA, emerging into motherhood and renewed self-possession, she’s the songwriting seeker plumbing the depths of the psyche, and refusing to curry favour. “I wouldn’t wish meeting me on anybody,” says Laura Marling.

Interview by VICTORIA SEGAL Portrait by TAMSIN TOPOLSKI

THERE IS AN ACTUAL PRAM IN THE HALL OF Laura Marling’s north London house – the very object that literary critic Cyril Connolly declared the “enemy of good art”. If so, nobody’s told Marling. The singer-songwriter’s beautiful eighth album, Patterns In Repeat, was written after Marling had a baby in February 2023, a dreamy, drumless record about motherhood, life-cycles and the cosmic hand-me-downs of family connection.

“When I see people have written albums about becoming mothers, I already find it boring,” laughs Marling. “And I am a mother and I have just written an album about becoming a mother.” She slips into the gently self-mocking tone she uses when she thinks she’s becoming too lofty: “In defence of my own record, it’s not just about being a mother. It’s about the dynamics of the whole constellation.”

Marling, her songwriter-turned-chef partner George, their one-year-old daughter and their dog have just moved back home after having the place painted, and as the singer-songwriter carries her black coffee from kitchen to front room, she explains there are usually paintings on the walls, and the sofa isn’t usually there. Furniture placement, it will transpire, is very important to Marling. She recently posted a photograph of her daughter in her basement home studio – although it doesn’t quite echo her own upbringing as a studio owner’s child.

“I grew up in a proper amazing analogue studio,” she smiles. “She’ll be growing up in that crappy thing I built downstairs.”

Covering Neil Young songs her father taught her made the teenage guitarist Marling stand out at school assemblies; she left her Reading school at 16 for London, singing with Noah And The Whale and finding herself thrown into the “nu-folk” scene associated with Johnny Flynn and Mumford & Sons. When her folkloric debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, arrived in 2008, its preternatural maturity quickly set the 18-year-old apart.

If she was initially annoyed to find herself described as a “confessional” songwriter – “Don’t belittle me by making out I can only write about verbatim what’s happened to me” – 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, 2011’s A Creature I Don’t Know and 2013’s Once I Was An Eagle furthered Marling’s mission to capture complicated interior worlds with the clear-eyed lyricism of key influences Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. A fight-or-flight period living in Los Angeles led to the psychic meltdowns of 2015’s Short Movie and, two years later, Semper Femina’s lush, complicated explorations of femininity, before a return to England led to the cleansing breath of 2020’s Song For Our Daughter.

Having finished an MA in psychoanalysis just before giving birth, Marling has recently started The Tarot Of Songwriting, a Substack subtitled “around and about songwriting and what causes it”.

Doesn’t this make songwriting sound like an illness or mutation? “A compulsion!” she laughs, revealing her worries that motherhood would kill her creativity quickly vanished. “I always struggled with calling myself an artist,” she says. “I found it very un-English and embarrassing. But having a baby affirmed my artistry. I couldn’t stop it. It was still going.”