Laura Marling: ‘Everyone considers their place in society, but I think being a woman has been particularly complicated for me’

Patterns of life for many of us have changed under the coronavirus lockdown, and singer-songwriter Laura Marling is no exception. Nevertheless she’s found one break from the norm particularly unexpected. Where often in the past she has craved solitude, now the 30-year-old musician has become a far more visible presence on social media.

“I think I’ve actually been more sociable since this started,” she reflects. “It’s reignited a want to make sure everyone’s okay. I think it’s made me more sociable, if anything.”

She tells of enjoying her daily walks on the marshes near her home in near-east London, interspersed with giving regular guitar tutorials on Instagram Live.

In an effort to both “entertain” people and “provide some sense of union” in difficult times, Marling, a Brit Award winner who has also been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize three times, has brought forward the release of her seventh solo album, Song For Our Daughter, by several months.

Originally intended to come out in August, it is now available to stream (with physical copies to follow on July 10). With its warm, thoughtful tone, she is hopeful that others in these extraordinary times might appreciate its contemplative mood.

“I don’t like to sit on albums anyway,” she adds. “I thought it would be quite nice for me to have it out. But also I don’t think people who are into my music necessarily listen to it at loud parties. I thought now might be a good time.”

As a close observer of people, who in recent years has formally studied for a masters degree in psychology, she often finds herself digging beneath the surface of conversations. “When I’m not in isolation and I’m a bit more of a hermit, when I do speak to people and I try to understand what it is they really want to say, quite often it’s underneath what they say,” she says.

It’s something she has experienced before, when she has found her writing is “months or years” ahead of her conscious mind. “There’s a hippie dippy element to it,” she says. “Any kind of writing, or creativity, I guess, is somewhat prophetic; it expresses something that is maybe not quite conscious.”

The prevailing theme in Song For Our Daughter is the question of how Marling would guide an imaginary daughter and “arm her and prepare her for life and all of its nuance”. It wasn’t, she says, specifically informed by her own experience of the music industry when she was younger (at 18 the Reading-born singer had been tagged as part of a ‘nu folk’ scene that also included the likes of Mumford & Sons and Noah and the Whale); she had been thinking more of the #MeToo movement.

“I think it’s much more broad than just the music industry,” she says. “Everyone considers their place in society, but I think being a woman has been a particularly complicated experience for me so far. You can put it so reductively that I was such a tomboy when I was little and then femininity has meant so much to me as I have got older, and trying to understand whether femininity has been misunderstood particularly in creativity, and what the differences are between masculinity and femininity. They both exist in everyone.”

Marling has cited two key influences who have latterly led her to rethink her writing. One is Mike Lindsay, of the folktronica group Tunng, who she collaborated with in a side project, Lump. The other is Robert Icke, the writer and theatre director, for whom she composed music for his production of Mary Stuart.

“Mike’s a clever person,” she says. “He’s quite a character, he just has this sort of childlike enthusiasm. We always record in his studio and I’m always stepping into his world and I don’t know what happens there but I always write the lyrics about a minute before they’re recorded and some magic happens for me.

“Then with Robert, it’s the complete opposite approach. His methodical, incredibly intellectual understanding of language and expression had a big influence on me, particularly how you use the rhythm of language to add an extra bite. So they’ve both been pretty influential.”

Working with again Lindsay on a second Lump album, due out later this year, has made her explore her spontaneous side, she says. “I’m not sure it affected my solo writing but with Lump, we’ve now finished mixing and mastering the second album and listening back to it, there’s such a coherent theme and it seems mad to me that’s what came out of these sessions.

“They were so random. I guess that’s what I was saying; that there is a thing that lurks just below the surface that’s accessible only to a creative outlet maybe.”

Despite the fact that Marling describes ambiguity as her “forte”, Song For Our Daughter contains some of her most straightforward songs. “I wanted to distil the sentiments a little bit more,” she says.

She has been absorbing lessons in the craft from listening to the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and particularly Tom Waits, citing songs the latter wrote for his 1992 theatre show Alice. “I forget how much impact he has on me as a songwriter. If you listen to a song like Alice, you don’t realise when you start that the whole song is crafted to end with this brilliant line where he carves ‘Alice’ into the ice and falls through it, and that just delivers the sentiment of the madness of evacuation.”

The album’s opening track, Alexandra, is a response to the song Alexandra Leaving, by another songwriter she much admires, the late Leonard Cohen. Marling says she found herself more frustrated by Nick Broomfield’s recent documentary film Marianne and Leonard than the fact that Cohen failed to imbue the subject of his song with any interior life. “I found [Broomfield’s] portrayal of Marianne as this passive deliverer, I don’t know if it’s my own delusion, but I couldn’t believe it. Maybe it’s my wont. But I feel when I was a young teenager and I’d listen to Leonard Cohen, I felt like he understood women and wrote very beautifully about women.

“In truth I didn’t give her a voice in the song, she doesn’t speak directly, I’m interested in what the experience of being in his passionate eyeline would’ve been like.”

Her song Fortune was inspired by the revelation that her mother had secretly kept a “running away fund” just in case she ever felt the need to leave the family.

It led Marling to expound on the wider tragedy of many women of her mother’s generation who felt trapped by circumstance. “Someone pointed out to me recently... that there’s an impulse to go back in time and protect women from the complex time they were involved in,” she says. “It’s a tragedy because there is a comic element to the idea that you might over a period of time collect enough pound coins to start your next life, and the fact that my mother did it because her mother did it and there was no real sense as to why, it was just what women did.”

Song For Our Daughter’s lush sound was created in her own studio. “I’d been playing around with rearranging songs on the computer – which I’d never done before. It was good, it was like editing but in real time. I wanted to indulge a bit in very layered backing vocals and very opulent strings and turning the bass up as loud as possible.”

Uncertainty over when the coronavirus lockdown might be lifted means touring plans are on hold, but Marling hopes to get out on the road later in the year. “Touring is a really big part of my life,” she says. “It’s a really big part of my creative life, I write things on the road.”

Marling is, however, sceptical that recent events will profoundly change the gigging experience, as some believe. “A couple of people I’ve spoken to have said it’ll be such an event, people will be happy to be out and about. I can imagine that, but also as time goes on I’m beginning to think that not much is going to change, sadly... But one mustn’t be prophetic,” she says.

Song For Our Daughter is out now. www.lauramarling.com