“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly/ Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” sings Laura Marling to her baby daughter on Patterns in Repeat. Recorded mostly at the 34-year-old musician’s north London home, the album features infant gurgles and dog collar jangles interspersed with her decisively plucked acoustic guitar. It’s a record that celebrates motherhood as an expansion of creativity, rather than the stifling of it that she had expected.
It’s unsurprising that Marling feared the pram in the hall. Ever since the release of her 2008 debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, released when she was just 18, critics have compared her precocious talent to that of Joni Mitchell – who put her only child up for adoption in 1965 and spent much of her subsequent songwriting career comparing the lonely exhilarations of her fearless artistry with the cosy prison of domesticity that she contemptuously/covetously cast as “the lady’s choice”.
