“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”.
Like Mitchell, Marling finds her truth in angular melodies that often elbow aside space for her blunt, questing confessions. She left home young, read fiercely, and sang of loving with wild unsentimentality. Often toying with the idea of walking away from the music industry, she took a break in America where she befriended vagabonds, cult members and people who lived off grid. She went electric (like Mitchell) on her 2015 album Short Movie, and in her podcast Reversing the Muse, challenged cultural constructs around women and art. On 2017’s Semper Femina she sang of yearning “to be the kind of free/women still can’t be alone”.
But it has been almost 60 years since Mitchell (then 20) felt forced to choose between music and motherhood. She was alone, with no support from her child’s father or her parents – and had not yet established herself as an artist. By contrast, Marling is a well-established talent, with financial security and a loving partner (a songwriter-turned-charcutier). Under these fortuitous conditions, she’s found parenthood to be an adventure and she stretches out thoughtfully into many of its corners on this album, like a baby in its first cot. Opener “Child of Mine” rises from a terrycloth-soft strum, casually picking up a heavenly choir as it journeys from intimate scenes of father-daughter kitchen dancing to the more abstract mysteries of the unreachable infant mind. Strings and accompanying male vocals curl around Marling’s voice like tiny fingers.
Marling recently earned a masters in psychoanalysis and attended “family constellation therapy” – a therapeutic approach in which she looked for patterns in gene pools. The skippily picked “Patterns” sees her relaxing into the repetition of generations that turn like seasons. She rakes leaves on “Your Girl” – the melody is slinky and her voice drops to a drawl as she tells a lover that he “let me down sometimes” as she “tried to play a boy’s game”. A piano pops in on “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can” and the guitar takes on a moody, melodramatic Spanish flare on “The Shadows”. You can hear the narrative turning on a flamenco dancer’s heel as Marling laments: “She knows, of course she knows… and one day she’ll tear me apart.” There’s a little flick of the skirt to Led Zep’s “Stairway To Heaven” in there, too.
There’s a bittersweet nod back to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” on “Caroline” – a song written from the perspective of an older man getting a call from the old flame who left him, asking her not to call again because: “I got married and I love my wife/I have kids, they’re good and grown now/All in all I’ve been happy with my life.” Marling’s voice – once again, like Mitchell’s – is often most soul-grazing when it drops low and cold. She contrasts those moments with the sweetness of a forgotten tune that goes: “Laaa, la, la, laaa – something something, Caroline.”
Marling has often credited her dad for teaching her his “birdlike” guitar technique. Here she goes one further and covers a song he wrote as a young man called “Looking Back”. Here his daughter projects herself into the future where she remembers the joy of early motherhood – she knows she’ll ache for it one day. The latin-flavoured “Lullaby” does what it says on the bottle, promising her child that she is “safe in my arms”.
The album closes neatly with its title song – jazzy chords lifting to hammock-swung refrains. “A smile or two/a gap between your tooth,” wisecracks the singer, always with an edge of sharpness. Never sappy. Strings saw their way between semitones like teethers. It should be enough that Marling has expressed this version of motherhood for herself and her family alone. But I can’t help hoping it opens hopeful doors for other creative women – and shows the music industry how to value and support mothers without expecting them to crack on like nothing game-changing has happened to their minds, bodies and souls.
