In the interview granted to us shortly after the release of “Songs For Our Daughter”, Laura Marling had told us heartfeltly about her changing times, between the desire to become a mother for the first time and the precious readings of the stories by Robertson Davies, Ottessa Moshfegh and Alison Bechdel. And also of his new home recording studio, the physical and emotional epicenter of his songs. A renewed awareness of one's years and of life in general, also understood as the itinerary of an unpredictable journey, which the English singer-songwriter places at the center of “Patterns In Repeat”, the eighth album which came after the longest recording break in over fifteen years of her career .
Recorded once again in the home studio and co-produced by Dom Monks, with additional string assistance from Rob Moose, “Patterns In Repeat” definitively focuses the maternal gaze of the London musician, who two years ago truly became a mother, thus giving us eleven celebrations, mostly acoustic, of a microcosm dotted with small moments spent with one's family. An intimacy that is now an essential light for the strings of the British composer, who, thanks to the previous “Songs For Our Daughter”, an album dedicated to an imaginary offspring at the time, also received a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Folk category Album and another as a finalist for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Starting right from theopen-trackthird single from the album, “Child Of Mine”, a song written, as she herself explains, while “she was making her daughter jump in her bouncer when she was four weeks old”.
It is a memory, the latter, that says a lot about the soul behind “Patterns In Repeat”. And again: “I hadn't sat down to write. It had been a while since I picked up the guitar, just to pass the time, so maybe it worked. I wrote the lullaby immediately afterwards and thought: ok maybe I could do a record this year. Over the course of nine months I had happily prepared myself for my life as a singer-songwriter to be put on hold while I adjusted to life as a parent, I was able to look into the eyes of another human being as I wrote. Of course, new parents feel as if they have discovered that sensation, one of the most beautiful that life has to offer, of looking into their baby's eyes and feeling the enormity of the bigger picture, the enormity of a precarious, celestial, fragile and extraordinary life, taking its place in the constellation of a family”.
Instead, the single “Patterns” anticipated the announcement of the long-awaited eighth album, another dirge with a very sweet pace, halfway between Collie Ryan and Sibylle Baier, with which Laura Marling once again addresses her daughter with words of unconditional love and at the same time full of care.
You're still a ballerina, everybody knows
But your feet are on the ground
But as the years go by and points comply
With ever more relief
Then patterns in repeat can begin
Instead, it is a music box emulated on the piano that lulls the second single, “No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can”, before the strings take over to lift Marling's singing, while the melody must have something in the chorus (listen, listen) to “La donna cannone” by De Gregori, consequently creating an almost magical short circuit, although actually alienating.
On the contrary, an unexpected sense of abandonment nourishes the verses of “Your Girl”, yet another ballad acoustically suspended in Marling's garden of dreams, between dimly lit choirs that anticipate the regret of an escape and the lovable attempt to be there despite everything.
And so you've turned your life around
Funny how those things all work out somehow for the clowns
I'm sure sometimes I let you down
Were you or me, I guess that doesn't matter now
You're over there, so no-one cares
That off I walk alone into this world
But I'll always be your girl
I'll always be your girl
The pace is slow and intimately poetic also in the following “Shadows”, almost a humble prayer and to tell us that the times of “Once I Was An Eagle” are very far away, which today still remains in some ways his unsurpassed masterpiece, at least in terms of approach upstream. In fact, Marling is now a singer-songwriter who is largely very different from the one she was ten or fifteen years ago, as a proud mother, intent on embracing her nest every day to also “make” it a source of musical inspiration. It is an inevitably bucolic approach that shines through clearly even in the instrumental interludes, such as “Interlude (Passages)”, recalling Balmorhea, while in “Caroline”, another pearl of the lot, the private folk romance comes back into vogue, sung with the grace of the muses of the 70s and the epic of an angel who has found his purpose in the earthly world.
The barely sketched choirs then emerge once again in “Looking Back”, introducing yet another lullaby to listen to over and over again at low lights, when everything is still, even for just three minutes. The same goes for “Lullaby”, which perhaps Elvis would have liked a lot (!).
“Here we are, after a youth spent desperately trying to understand what it means to be a woman, I am at the edge of the hill, with a completely new and enormous perspective surrounding me,” the singer-songwriter finally says. Words that explain more than a thousand others the specific weight and dimension of a dense, caressing album full of real life like few others in the current singer-songwriter panorama. A record that fully elevates motherhood in the strict sense, a bit like what happened for example in “Homebrew” by Neneh Cherry or more recently in “Looking Glass” by Alela Diane, thus courageously placing itself in opposition to certain capitalist ideologies of society Westerners, who inhumanly consider the happy news more of an obstacle to individual careers than a divine gift with which to give an authentic dimension to their existence and their music, in the specific case of Marling with decidedly remarkable results.
01/10/2024
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
