Song Exploder - Laura Marling - Song for Our Daughter

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Laura Marling is a singer and songwriter from London. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist—she’s been nominated five times for that, along with the Mercury Prize, and the Grammy for Best Folk Album. Since 2008, she’s released seven albums. The most recent album is called Song for Our Daughter. It’s also the name of the song that she takes apart in this episode. songexploder.net/laura-marling

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Before we start, I want to mention that in this episode, there's some discussions of themes that might be difficult for some. Sexual harassment and assault, as well as a mention of rape and suicide. Please use your best discretion. Laura Marling is a singer and songwriter from London. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist. She's been nominated five times for that, along with the Mercury Prize and the Grammy for Best.

folk album. Since 2008, she's released seven albums. The most recent is called Song for Our Daughter. That's also the name of the song that she takes apart in this episode. I spoke to Laura while she was in her home studio in London. Though they may want you to tread in their trail, only to see if the path they said fail. My name is Laura Marling. This is the longest I've ever taken to write a record. You know, I I started very young. I put out my first album when I was 17 and I'm now 30. When I was young, in a really wonderful way, and I think everybody experiences this when they're young, you're kind of a functioning narcissist in that you have this experience of the world in which you are the central character. And I think that's wonderful because I think that is full of color and vibrancy and it's a very necessary experience when you're young. But there was maybe a accumulation of events that led to this sort of next right of passage as a person. I metabolised a few experiences that I'd had as a younger woman that were very complex and in

some ways undigestable, the experience of somebody trampling a boundary that you weren't even aware needed to be policed. And the sort of traumatic effect of that experience can have effect of taking you out of the naive space, it really pushes you out of that time where you feel like the center of your own movie and it makes you this kind of vulnerable, you feel like there are no boundaries, there is nothing protecting you, you know, it's all in your mind, any sense of safety. And I think I felt a tremendous sense of unity in those experiences because I think a lot of young women go through them. But I came to a point in my life where the experiences had led up to me being able to cope with what they were

and move through them in a satisfying way. About a year after I made my last album, I was in France with my partner and we were staying in a sort of cabin outside Toulouse and he's also a musician and he has this very strange habit of playing the same chord sequence over a song. and over and over and over again,

until he's kind of perfected the playing of it. And that chord sequence ended up seeping into my unconscious, and I ended up writing a song with it without ever having asked him what the chord sequence was. So he's got a co-writing credit on this track, which is nice. I've got a Martin M32, and it's a 1986 Brazilian Rosewood guitar, and it's my pride and joy. I always take that with me, wherever I go.

When a song comes easy, I feel like I'm surgically attached to the guitar until it's done. So I will go over and over and over. I'll start singing nonsense over the top of it. And it will mutate into what will end up being the song. So it's not like it comes out perfect, but it comes out in the course of 24 hours, I'd say. I've lately got to thinking about my dog. I do not have a daughter. I have no children.

Like all people, I felt the kind of biological, chemical urge to have children. I have goddaughters and I have nephews. And there's still every possibility that I might have children at some point. But my rational brain is very ambivalent about it. I think the inspiration for song for our daughter, you know, somewhere at the back of my mind existed in my experience of having read this book by Maya Angelou called Letters to My Daughter. It's a series of kind of essays written to a non-existent daughter that are an accumulation of her experiences in life and how they've contributed to how she

conducts herself. And the implied openness of Maya Angelou's book that it could be read by me and the lessons could be for me and I can interpret them in any way I can. I find that incredibly moving. I have been fortunate enough in the last couple of years to have a studio in my basement. So I spent a long time in my studio, experimenting with sounds,

trying to find things that accentuated the emotional moments and indulging in lushness a bit. So the demo's all me, playing everything. You can remember. Another kind of influence on the song is a very tragic. It's a story from sort of Roman antiquity. It's called the Rape of Lucretia,

and it's about this young noble woman who the evening before her wedding is raped, and no one believed her. And in that time, they believed if you'd been any way, kind of sullied, your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one morning, and she stabbed herself in the chest, the chest and of course her blood was black and she died. I came across that story and was kind of

struck by its contemporary relevance. All over contemporary culture is this very contentious meeting between experience and law and how difficult it is for traumatised women to correctly by, in terms of the language of law, express their experience. It's just, it's just, it's, it's, they're just not very well understood. And that frustration is sad. With a demo like that, a kind of highly fleshed out demo. It's like painting impasto, whatever they say, you know, kind of very thick brushstrokes. And then you take it to a sort of master classical painter and they do it in far more detail.

So I sort of have a core musical TV. that I work with a lot. The longest serving member of my musical team is a guy called Nick Peeney, who's an amazing jazz bassist. And then we had this pianist called Anna Cochran who had this beautiful taste. Her taste is really unusual

in what she chooses to play. I co-produced this record with Ethan Johns, and he played drums on this track. He's actually one of my favorite drummers. The last first one of my favorite drummers. The last verse is a very unexpected entrance of some very straightforward drumming. Until then, to me, it feels like it could live out its entire course being a kind of balladie song.

And then suddenly there's this drive added at the last moment. And it's unexpected and it's kind of just what you need to keep you interested in it. Instruments, when they're well placed, feel like they're holding me up. And I feel like the drums are doing that in this circumstance. They're kind of offering a tactile support. Since the very first recording I ever did, I've never recorded vocals and guitar separately. So I always play my acoustic guitar and sing at the same time

because to me the important relationship that's happening there is my bodily relationship to the guitar because the resonant part of my chest is touching the guitars. And it sort of seemed insane to me. that you would ever take those two things apart, they're one thing. So much to the annoyance of every engineer I've ever worked with, that's how I record. Though they may want you to tread in their trail,

only to see if the path they said fail. As I get older, I enjoy the kind of increasing responsibility to a younger generation to protect their innocence and their freedom in the most vibrant time of their lives, where they will be the most creative and the most interested in the world and have the most interesting ideas. The idea that that can be cut short

by a sort of cultural injustice, I find that a very sad thing. It's all something that children and young people deserve to be protected from, and if we could change the culture from our perspective at our time in life, what would we change? That was the sort of overriding feeling that I felt.

Though they may want you to take off your clothes, whatever they think that the action exposed. With your clothes on the floor, taking advice from some old balding bore, you'll ask yourself, did I want this at all? We were recording in Wales, which is about five hours away from where I live, And I would come home at the weekends and put backing vocals on everything that we did during the week in my little studio and then bring them back on my laptop. I find that backing vocals are the most embarrassing thing to do in front of other people.

So I really don't like to do them in proper studios. And I also think it's a huge waste of time and money to do them in proper studios because they're so easily done at home. So part of the joy of having a room of my own, as I have got now for the first time in my life, is that I can do all that kind of embarrassing stuff without fear of humiliation. The book you left by your bed. And I like close, weird harmonies. I like harmonies that sound like they're possibly going to be out of tune and then they sort of resolve in a nice way.

And also there's a line that I took from a Robertson Davis book, who's a Canadian writer. He had a line about one of his characters dying from a kiss from God. and what he meant by that was like beautiful excessive curiosity killed her your excessive curiosity killed her. And no matter how much one might want to protect the youth from letting that curiosity put them in the path of danger. There is no way you can protect them from that. If you're looking to flesh out sort of emotional points of a song,

if you're in my genre of music, you either do that with backing vocals or with strings. So there's a lot of choral backing vocals and beautiful strings by Rob Moose. And he is a very familiar sound to lots of people now because he's done Bon Iver, Anoni, Paul Simon. So I had put these kind of very elementary string pads on the demo as a kind of point of reference of where I might imagine strings coming in and sort of where they might be useful. And then I sent it to Rob and I said, oh, we're on a bit of a tight deadline as we always are and a tight budget as we always are. and would you do this in the cheapest, quickest way you possibly can? And he sent back to us a message saying, I hope you don't mind, but the approach that I took

was embodying the daughter, the character of the daughter. I sort of envisioned her rising up above you and being this effective presence in the song. He's done such an incredibly empathetic job. It just, I listened to it, you know, on those, huge speakers at the desk and the studio, and I burst into floods and floods of tears. I couldn't believe it. I've always been interested in the feminine relationship to creativity and why, in a kind of societal sense, it might have been inhibited over time. And I think traumatic experience

answers a lot of those questions, because I think it takes a long time to get back to a space that's very good for writing or creativity in any kind where you feel safe enough to be vulnerable. So for me, I wanted to end the song with a kind of triumphant and hopeful idea that you will cut that down, whatever those seeds bear, can be cut down and started again. Innocence gone, but it's not. You know, this is all stuff that I wish I had known. And I don't feel like I learned it the hard way. I feel like I learned it the way. that people learn it.

But I certainly wish I had had more of a sense of ownership over my boundaries. And I wish I'd stood up for myself in certain situations or confronted certain situations in a different way. And I wish that the culture had been there to, on a foundational level, prepare me for that. I addressed things in the song as if they were things to be prepared. for, I guess. But the sentiment really is that the experiences are inevitable,

but how you handle them is up to you. Here's song for our daughter by Laura Marling in its entirety. Though they may want you to tread in their trail, only to see if the path they said fail. Though they may want you to take off your clothes, Whatever they think that the action exposed With your clothes on the floor Taking advice from some old balding ball

You'll ask yourself, Did I want this at all? Do you remember what I said? Book I left by a baby Survive Lately I've been thinking about our daughter grown Boo-shit that she might be She remembers what I said.

For a kiss from in your child, innocence, know what I said. Visit SongExploder.net to learn more about Laura Marling. You'll also find a link to stream or buy this song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get taken.

for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me and producer Christian Coons with production help from Olivia Wood and illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn more about all our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.