By Lydia Firth
At the beginning of this month, I had the absolute pleasure of attending one of Laura Marling’s four nights of residency in Hackney Church. In case you’re not familiar with Marling, she has been a steady presence in the indie folk and singer-songwriter world since the 2000s, releasing her first album ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ at the age of just 18 and winning the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist in 2011. Her classic sound has led her to be compared to the likes of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Having been a fan for a few years, I was excited by the prospect of seeing her in such an intimate and atmospheric venue.
Marling opened with a fifteen-minute number of four interwoven songs from her 2013 magnum opus ‘Once I Was an Eagle’. She joked we’d passed the endurance test, but really it was no challenge: her intonation is addictively Bob Dylan-esque and she sings lines like ‘I will not be a victim of romance’ as if they’re an incantation, with an admirable acerbity. The crowd were engrossed: to her, singing and playing is entirely instinctive. The first half of the concert was dedicated to her reasonably extensive back catalogue and for the second half she was joined by strings and a choir to perform the entirety of her new album, ‘Patterns in Repeat’, as well as a couple of cult-classics.
Alongside her quintessential odes to women persecuted or misunderstood, the principal focus of her new album is motherhood. Alluding to Cyril Connolly’s assertion that parenthood and creativity are incompatible, she stated on the album release day that she hoped ‘if nothing else this album serves to represent the possibility that the pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art’. She is undoubtedly successful at proving Connolly wrong. Almost paradoxically, reflecting her precise use of words, she sings in the title track ‘I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me’. Despite this complete candour, the album never borders on saccharine, she retains a dark edge: her artistic integrity and storytelling capacity runs too deep.
From the new album, ‘Caroline’ has quickly become a classic. Reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, it’s haunting and utterly timeless. The ingenious idea of forgotten lyrics (‘A song I only just remember / That goes oh, something something, Caroline’) reflects Marling’s wit, which was delightfully highlighted for me during the gig when a fan shouted out ‘we love you, Laura!’ and she replied, knowingly, ‘good, good’. Her quiet confidence is palpable: even when she sang the wrong lyrics in one song and suffered some technical guitar malfunctions, she resumed the song unfazed, clicking back into an almost ethereal state of absorption which was incredible to watch.
Recorded in her home, the new album features faint baby gurgles and chirping birds, which complement the soaring string sections to tether the album to a strong sense of reality, different from earlier albums of which the narratives are more fantastical and abstract. ‘No one’s gonna love you like I can’ is another standout: a gut-wrenchingly beautiful two-minute song which she performed on the piano. It is perhaps the closest to sickly-sweet she gets, but she retains her usual playful blend of sentimentality and sharpness (‘You were saying something strange just to make me misbehave’). Hearing this song live, it’s apparent that the album is more hopeful, expansive, and forwards-looking than her previous works; the song takes flight with the help of the strings as she sings ‘And if life is just a dream / I’m gonna make it mean something worth a damn’.
With no opening act nor encore, something Marling fans have come not to expect, she closed the show with the song ‘For You’, from her 2020 album ‘A Song for Our Daughter’. Released three years before having her daughter, she now refers to the album interchangeably as ‘Premonition’. The tone aligns with that of the new album as she sings ‘I thank a God I’ve never met / Never loved, never wanted (For you)’. A fusion of her innate scepticism and her joy at becoming a mother, with a lilting rhythm, it rounded up the concert charmingly. She waved quickly at the audience, unslung her guitar, and headed off-stage, embodying her understated and underrated genius.