From Uncut’s August 2020 issue [Take 279], the songwriting seeker talks us through her back catalogue…

A follow-up to this spring’s Song For Our Daughter may be a little way off, explains Laura Marling. “If I’m on the road for an extended period of time, I tend to have written an album by the time I get back,” she says. “Obviously that’s been completely scuppered by coronavirus. When I’m at home I play the guitar but I don’t really feel the need to write – I mean, I’m at home, I’ve got nothing to miss.”

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For now, though, there’s her extensive back catalogue to enjoy, and it’s this body of work that the songwriter is taking us through here; from her first studio experiences to orchestral arrangements for three bass guitars, via her own personal highpoint, 2013’s Once I Was An Eagle: “It’s just one of those things, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Along the way, Marling ponders her time in Los Angeles, being one half of Lump and her mission as a solo artist today. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel,” she says. “As much as I love Blake Mills’ production on Semper Femina – and I would take that any day – really it’s about whether I’m a good songwriter. That’s all I’m really interested in.”

ALAS, I CANNOT SWIM
VIRGIN, 2008
Marling’s debut, produced by Noah & The Whale’s Charlie Fink

We had four weeks at Eastcote Studios, two weeks doing my record and then a further two weeks back-to-back doing the Noah & The Whale record. We laid down the bass, drums, guitar and vocal all at once, and then we did overdubs – this is the same for all albums I’ve done, pretty much. My dad ran a recording studio which shut down when I was quite small, but I remember growing up around all of that outboard gear at home. So I guess I was slightly more familiar with the studio than the average 17-year-old, but still it was my first proper session. These were all my first songs, written from the age of 16-17. There was a batch of songs before that that were on an EP, “London Town” – I didn’t like them very much by the time I got to making this. I haven’t listened to this for a long while, I very rarely play any of those songs live, so it’s a bit of a distant memory to me now. And the production was very much of the time I guess, that ‘new folk’ world – glockenspiels and banjos and whatever – which is good, that’s what it was supposed to be then. I don’t really think of this as part of my catalogue.

I SPEAK BECAUSE I CAN
VIRGIN, 2010
A leap forward, with Marling inspired by British folk and The Odyssey, and working with producer Ethan Johns

The difference between being 16 and being 19 is quite a shift, isn’t it? Ethan was very intimidating, but I quickly realised it was nothing but a type of shyness. He turned down the first record, but I tried again with the second one – he seemed to be more impressed with the songwriting. I went down to meet Ethan at Real World Studios, where he was working at the time. He came and picked me up from the station, and he was wearing triple denim and circular pink sunglasses, like John Lennon, and he had his crazy California hair. I thought he looked completely mental. I was very shy still, I didn’t really say much. As we were walking around Real World, he said, “It’s never really worked out for me, working with female artists, I seem to not do well with it.” So, being in my tomboy/late teenage years, I was like, “Well, I’m not like every girl, it’s going to be a totally different experience”, and it was. We started at Eastcote, but Ethan didn’t like the sound of the room, so we moved to Real World. I took my band with me, and we all stayed there at probably horrendous expense. We got driven in our splitter van from Glastonbury to Real World, we stayed there for two weeks and it was really magical. I’d read The Odyssey, and I obviously thought I was quite clever because of that, so a lot of it was based around Penelope and Odysseus, and Hera – there’s a lot of Greek mythology and Classics, I was really into it then. I had discovered tunings after the first album too, and a lot of I Speak Because I Can was in major and minor open-D tunings. I was also going through the unbelievable intensity of anybody’s late teenage years, I was so full of fucking hormones and excitement. I remember writing a lot, it was a good time.

A CREATURE I DON’T KNOW
VIRGIN, 2011
The more expansive third record, again produced by Ethan Johns

I went from touring I Speak Because I Can straight into the studio to make this. That was the cycle that I was on then – I made the album, put it out, toured it for a year and then went straight back into the studio with a new crop of songs. It was a natural progression; the sound of this album was dictated by my touring band at the time, as we had been playing all these songs in soundchecks for the previous six months. We did all the pre-production away from Ethan because everybody was too scared to play in front of him. My drummer and my keyboard player, they’re proper musicians who’ve been playing with me almost since the beginning, they’re proper trained incredible musicians, but everyone else in the band didn’t really consider themselves a musician. So I had a slightly ragtag band. Of course Ethan’s got the little black book of every musician you might want, but I only wanted people that I loved on the records, that I knew were on my side. Maybe that was a bit paranoid of me, but I was a bit paranoid then of everybody, and I wanted to make sure that ultimately I had control of everything. It was also very important for me to keep my musicians employed, which I did manage to do for those four or five years, which felt like an achievement. So what I was doing was because of a mix of paranoia and economic anxiety!

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT AUGUST 2020/TAKE 279 IN THE ARCHIVE