Album Review: Laura Marling - 'Song For Our Daughter'
After some much needed time away focussing on other projects (forming experimental duo LUMP with Mike Lindsay and enrolling in a Master’s degree in psychoanalysis), Laura Marling returns with exceptional new record ‘Song For Our Daughter’ – a collection of the most wonderful storytelling, liberating and reflective in its intimacy, wrapped in intricate folk melodies.
The themes on ‘Song For Our Daughter’ are varied, ranging from songs inspired by her mother (‘Fortune’) over nods to other creatives like Leonard Cohen (‘Alexandra’) and Robert Icke (‘Only The Strong’) to painting a beautiful image of the forever kind of love (’For You‘). What ties them together is their brave vulnerability. Laura Marling doesn’t shy away from speaking hard-hitting truths, she goes looking for them and, when she finds one, turns it into lyrics that are hard to forget – “Sometimes the hardest thing to learn is what you get from what you lose.“ (‘Only The Strong’).
The album reaches peak vulnerability in title track ‘Song For Our Daughter’ that, as Laura explains, talks about “innocence being taken away prematurely […] and the idea you could arm the next generation in a way that you weren’t.” Her warm, soothing vocals are accompanied by soft strings and a disarmingly beautiful melody that almost guarantees a couple of treacherous tears escaping. In fact, this “leaves-you-speechless” kind of songwriting spans across the entire record.
Talking about the recording process, Laura says: “I demoed everything really heavily, and re-edited loads of stuff, so I did all of the arrangements, I knew all the musicians I wanted to work with. I mixed the record with Dom [Monks — who has engineered several Marling albums]. And all of the backing vocals on this album I did at home because I wanted no one else’s opinion!”
Here is an artist who knows what she wants, who has a clear vision and sticks to it, and it very clearly paid off. ‘Song For Our Daughter’ is absolutely stunning.
Words by Laura Freyaldenhoven