Laura Marling laments her lost muse
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Urgency and anger … Singer-songwriter Laura Marling has released a fifth album.
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CLEARLY the concept of “the muse” has been on Laura Marling’s mind for some time.
Her acclaimed third album, 2011’s A Creature I Don’t Know, even opened with a track titled The Muse, which contained the line: “I’m nothing but a beast, And I call you when I need to feast.”
So, as fraught as the 25-year-old UK singer-songwriter’s relationship may have been with the elusive, external force that inspires creativity and artistry, at least Marling has always been able to count on it showing up.
But sometime after 2013 release of her fourth album, Once I Was An Eagle, the muse left her. Marling was living in Los Angeles, a base from which she had done several laps of the US, when she retreated from music for eight long months. By that point, she’d already turned in a collection of songs to long-time producer Ethan Johns, which both agreed were “uneventful”. To quote one of her musical heroes and the woman to whom she is most often compared, Joni Mitchell, it was a case of “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”.
And for as prolific and revered a talent as Marling, who released her first album aged 18 and has now made five in seven years — surely that was like losing a limb?
“I had little choice in the matter,” Marling says of her time away from music, during which she worked a regular service job to pay the bills. “It didn’t seem to want to happen. It was undignified — that’s exactly what it felt like. My music and my ability and my confidence in my ability were a huge part of my persona. Because that’s such a grounding thing to be confidently doing what you are lucky enough to be good at. And I didn’t have that — for the first time ever. It was horrible.”
Back with a new album … English singer-songwriter Laura Marling lost her music temporarily.
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To compound matters, the pale-skinned, articulate English rose was at a point where she felt adrift in a strange city. Initially she had been drawn to Los Angeles thanks to a relationship, which promptly ended. But more than that was the prospect of arriving largely unknown in a new environment in which she could be whoever she wanted and do whatever she wanted.
“That was a very important part of it,” she agrees. “I think that was probably the thing that drew me here, which could have drawn me anywhere that wasn’t England really.”
While she says she had no ambition of cracking America on any grand scale, part of her was also drawn to the idea of crisscrossing the continent, seeking out new audiences and new challenges, armed with just her three guitars.
“It is true to say that in the time that I was living here I was very keen on doing these tours of America in the only way that I could afford to do them, which was on my own, with no tour manager and no crew,” she says. “It was incredibly exciting.”
Curiously, she says she never felt lonely on those long solo trips. Rather it was when she returned to the big city and struggled to the very thing she was best at that the “aloneness” she relished on the road morphed into a darker loneliness, spurred in part by the exhaustion of her solo endeavours as well as “setting up a whole new life in this very fragmented way in a very fragmented city”.
“Interestingly I never felt lonely in the entire time I travelled around America — not once did I feel disconnected from humanity,” she says. “Only living in Los Angeles for eight months without much purpose. And purpose gives so much dignity — I hadn’t paid much attention to that. So I was living without the dignity of purpose basically and that’s when I felt lonely.”
“I had to sort of slightly admit defeat in the end and retreat back to where people knew me in my true sense. But it wasn’t that I was beaten out of Los Angeles, it was more that I exhausted my resources or something.”
It was that loneliness and loss of identity — as well as the world of mysticism and psychedelia so prevalent in LA — that fed into Marling’s new album, Short Movie, which she recorded back on home turf in London. The muse that had deserted her so cruelly and suddenly, reappeared, albeit slowly, and she began to craft the tracks that now appear on the new album in the order in which they were written.
“It was very tentative,” she says of her return to music. “I remember sitting down to write what would be (opening track) Warrior and I was nervous to sing again and quite self-aware. I think I was too aware and too grateful — I was like a needy girlfriend or something. Or a needy lover I should say, who was aware that the relationship was unbalanced. But that subsided as the writing progressed.”
As her confidence returned, so too the vision of what she wanted the album to sound like crystallised in her mind. In addition to the delicate folk and literate, textured lyrics that have made her one of the most revered singer-songwriters of her generation, Marling has added a harder edge and a more discordant sound, playing electric guitar on an album herself for the first time. And despite a run with Ethan Johns that produced three masterful albums, she opted to take the controls herself this time.
“I felt like it was a little bit fragile and that I needed to protect it,” she says. “When I thought about producing it myself, it wasn’t that I thought ‘I’m going to do all of this’ it was more that I knew if I produced it myself I would work with these particular people no questions asked.
“The string players are three of my oldest friends, the engineer was a lovely friend of mine in a tiny studio that I love and my drummer Matt basically co-produced with me. They were all just gentle, ego-less people. It’s hard to get all of those people in a room if there is someone else running the show.”
Marling, the youngest of three sisters, says she has been accused in the past of lacking compassion and empathy, sometimes by those closest to her. While her fierce independent streak remains, she says her LA experience has changed the way she perceives her relationship with family, friends and her career.
“Quite profoundly in fact,” she says. “My family in particular, whom I have always been lucky enough to be close to but they have a new meaning for me now and that’s kind of just a product of living away from home. But it has affected everything. My relationship to my work and what I am doing and who I am and what my place is in the world has not become any clearer, but I am a lot more grateful for it.”
Short Movie is out now
