In 2020, Laura Marling released Song For Our Daughter, a metaphoric discourse with, and about, her fictional offspring. “I drew pictures of you/Long before I met you/Just a fragment of my mind,” she sang on the wistful “For You”. And so it went on: “Now that I have you/I will not forget/What a miracle you are.”
Conceptually at least, it was slightly out of step with her previous albums, which tended to map the emotional chorography of her journey from teenage nu-folk ingénue to singer-songwriter of serious repute. Yet there was more at play than pure imagination. For all its acoustic delicacy and gentle percussive touches, Song For Our Daughter ran deep and dark.
Marling referenced the trials of making her way in a male-dominated industry that had once encouraged her to ditch the guitar and be a ‘proper’ frontwoman instead. The same industry where factions of the press often sought to diminish and define her presence by picking over her early romantic relationships with fellow musicians. Song For Our Daughter addressed it all in abstract terms – anguish, application, the premature death of innocence, femininity and modern society. “Lately I’ve been thinking/About our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told”, went the title track, Marling’s voice unwaveringly clear.
The album turned out to be prophetic. Marling called it a premonition. Her first child, Maudie, was born in February last year, a joyous landmark that’s now prompted another new arrival: Patterns In Repeat. If Song For Our Daughter was intended to offer her imaginary child “all the confidences and affirmations I found so difficult to provide myself”, then Patterns In Repeat attempts to put it into practical use.
It is, primarily, an album about familial love and parenthood, in all its mosaic forms. A song cycle – a pattern in repeat – of shifting generational dynamics, legacies, consequences, fresh perspectives. Marling describes it as “the drama of the domestic sphere…the good intentions we hold onto for our progeny and the many and various ways they get lost in time. So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday.”
This complexity, this curious tension between the ecstatic and the ordinary, is perfectly illustrated on Patterns In Repeat’s first track. “Child Of Mine” opens onto a scene from the Marling household in London in early 2023. She’s softly fingerpicking chords on guitar, singing to her four-week-old daughter, who’s presently occupied by Marling’s partner: “You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen/Life is slowing down but itʼs still bitchinʼ.” You can even hear Maudie let out a contented ambient gurgle. And somewhere the family dog shakes its collar.
“Child Of Mine” is the perfect primer for what follows. Everything is intimate, close-miked, often conversational. No drums. And while the scene is ostensibly a study in homely bliss, Marling brings to bear the full weight of what it is to be a first-time parent – from exhilaration to terror, from total and unconditional devotion to the realisation that nothing will ever be the same again. Furthermore, she doesn’t want to miss any of it: “Everything you want is in your reach right now/And anything thatʼs not I have to teach somehow/Everything about you is intuitive/So those who miss the point might rush right through it.”
What began as an acoustic demo is given fuller form by muted piano, Katt Newlon’s cello, discreet backing vocals by Big Thief’s Buck Meek and a graceful string arrangement courtesy of violinist Rob Moose, reprising his role – another recurring pattern – from Song For Our Daughter and its 2017 predecessor, Semper Femina. This semi-symphonic approach is a key element of Patterns In Repeat. In the weeks after giving birth, Marling immersed herself in Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story, its swirling dramatic currents helping her to process a tidal wave of new sensations. Of interrelated value, too, was Tom Waits’ rueful, orchestrated cover of “Somewhere” (from 1978’s Blue Valentine) that she and Moose discussed as a touchstone.
The haunted demeanour of Waits’ “Somewhere” is crucial. Patterns In Repeat may be rhapsodic at times, but its mood is investigative rather than merely celebratory. “Patterns” examines how behavioural traits recur almost unconsciously across generations, of their own volition. The exquisite “Your Girl” – musically inspired, initially, by guitarist Larry Carlton, best known for sophisticated turns on albums by Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell, another Marling touchstone – is written from a daughter’s viewpoint after the death of her father.
The song, based on an acquaintance of Marling’s, suggests a sometimes imperfect relationship, but also a deeply loving one. A deliberation on loss, womanhood and how we attempt to reconcile ourselves to grief, it’s sensitively measured in minimal guitar, a little piano, strings and Marling double-tracking herself on seraphic harmonies.
The experience prompted thoughts of her own father, Charlie, who ran a recording studio when she was young. Marling uncovered “Looking Back”, written by her dad nearly 50 years ago, while rooting through old tape archives. There’s a doubly reflective quality to Marling’s version of the song, viewed through the lens of an old man – his body bent, imprisoned in a chair – reflecting on distant places and past love. “I wonder if you think of me,” she sings, the air alive with strings and pale trails of synth. “Watching evening summers/Perhaps somewhere beyond the dark.” It’s a beautiful, bittersweet moment – the interior world of a young parent, shaped by hope, vulnerability and desire, suddenly reanimated by their own child. At the time of writing, Marling Snr. has yet to hear his daughter’s rendition.
Marling reserves the best for last. The title track is the most involved of the bunch, not only in practical terms – a seven-strong team deliver a gorgeous surge of strings; co-producer Dom Monks adds a decorative smatter of cymbals, bouzouki and synth bass – but thematically. Sparked by the recent death of a relative who raised her daughters without surrendering much of her personal liberty – only for those daughters to prioritise stability when it came to building their own families – it’s a song about the ripple effect of parenting: “You had your children on the fly/Another child, another guy, another chance to fall in love again/I fear they may have paid the price for the freedom of your life.”
But “Patterns In Repeat” is also about benefaction, the wisdom of experience, the legacies we inherit. And the artistic impulse itself. The song includes a fleeting musical nod to 2013’s Once I Was An Eagle, written when Marling was a twentysomething dreamer, chasing her own notions of freedom and self-autonomy. The reference acts as an acknowledgement that motherhood, despite initial doubts, has accentuated her creativity rather than tapered it.
“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly,” Marling intones, leaning into the final verse. “Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me/I want you to have a piece of my maternal flame/Part of me, eternity, a tolerance for pain.” And so it all ends, just as it begins: with a message for her daughter. Simple, graceful, moving, tender. Patterns in repeat.
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