For the better part of the past decade-and-a-half, Laura Marling has been releasing albums at a prolific pace, becoming one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters from the British “nu-folk” scene in the process. In 2011, she won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist and was nominated in the category in four of the next seven years, along with two Grammy nods. But around 2019, Marling hit the brakes, choosing to slow down a career that she launched when she was just 16.
“I really enjoyed this slower turn,” the 34-year-old Marling says over Zoom from her London home. “Life doesn’t come at you and it’s not quick dramas anymore. It’s more intense, complicated, slow dramas that play out in very, very fast time because time speeds up massively when you’re older.”
Marling started easing off with her seventh studio album, 2020’s Grammy-nominated Songs for Our Daughter, a rumination on motherhood with songs addressed to a fictional child. She had always wanted kids, but becoming a parent wasn’t on her immediate agenda.
“When I was writing Songs for Our Daughter, I wasn’t imagining or manifesting a daughter,” she says. “I reached a point in my adult life where I definitely felt no longer like a girl and more frequently like a woman.”
But three years later, in 2023, she gave birth to a daughter of her own, and the experience began to shape what would become Patterns in Repeat, her new album released in October. Like its predecessor, it’s intimate and quiet as it looks at life and its endings, motherhood, and the actions passed down from generation to generation — reflected in the track “Patterns,” which she wrote after she and her partner attended a funeral in Paris.
Despite her new role as a mother, Patterns in Repeat isn’t solely grounded in parenthood. Marling says she was inspired by music that expresses the “fragility of the human voice, or the power of the human voice,” she says. “Anything that brings me to tears.” When her daughter was born, that was Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. “I’m very sensitive to brilliant music,” she says.
In the past, Marling would lean on journaling to keep track of ideas that could potentially become songs. This time, she challenged herself to write and record the album, in her living-room studio in London, under a self-imposed deadline — before her daughter started walking. Then she sent the tracks off to arranger Rob Moose to add strings.
“The consequence [of recording quickly] was I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time to play with other musicians to get a vibe of the song,” Marling says. “I’m never looking for material or in want of it. But I’m also never thinking, ‘Oh, man, I should write an album soon.’”
In fact, Marling has been drawn more to oil painting than writing new songs lately. It’s all part of her take-it-as-it-comes approach to both creating and her career. Even so, she says she won’t stop writing and recording.
As she sings in Patterns of Repeat’s delicate standout “Child of Mine”: “Life is slowing down/but it’s still bitchin’.”
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