“I never thought about legacy before…”
Laura Marling sits in her home studio, musing on what she stands to leave behind; both as an artist and now, as a mother and partner. The English singer-songwriter became a first-time mother in 2023 – an experience that has understandably shifted her perspective and view on many things in life.
As an artist, motherhood has been something to explore through her music; specifically on her new album, Patterns in Repeat. Exploring the morality of motherhood (parenthood in general), the fragility of life, and the clashing of vibrant emotions that come with navigating the unknown, Marling’s creative output reflects changing dynamics in her personal life.
So when it comes to the concept of legacy, it is one that now holds more significance for Marling. Offering a wry smile she wonders, “With having a child it’s like, ‘Okay, what sort of mess might you be leaving for them?’”
Patterns in Repeat follows on from Marling’s 2020 album, Song for Our Daughter. That album, Marling’s seventh, was a collection of songs written to a fictional daughter. Full of intimate and nuanced moments, Song for Our Daughter held the listener in its embrace, wrapped up in gorgeous melodies and emotionally raw lyricism.
With Patterns in Repeat, Marling takes her well-honed brand of emotional and introspective songwriting a step further, fusing the intimacy with a newfound sense of sonic curiosity and scope. Beautiful moments of instrumentation sit alongside an overall hushed tone that makes sense when you consider the environment the album was created in.
Recording music in her home studio, while also caring for and monitoring her baby during these sessions, created a sense of quiet that the album almost had to be created in tandem with. When it comes to the final result, Patterns in Repeat lands with poignancy and care. Two things that aren’t foreign to Marling’s music, sure, but we hear each note linger that little bit longer; each melody layered meticulously; each vocal note backed by delicate soul.
For those who have navigated formative periods of their lives with Marling’s music as the soundtrack, Patterns in Repeat stands to feel like another moment of graduation or evolution.
Marling, herself, has thought about life’s chapters and their significance in relation to her work as well.
“I’m amazed it’s been made and it’s coming out,” she says. “What you said about it relating to people in a similar age bracket [as me], [I had] the voice I had in my head when I was making it. There isn’t much ceremonial distinction between the stages of life anymore. I found this one to be a hugely profound, massive shift.”
Patterns in Repeat saw Marling work with longtime collaborators Rob Moose and Dom Monks on string arrangements and co-production respectively. Simplicity was key when it came to creating the album, yet as the creative process progressed for Marling, she realised it was growing into something bigger and more beautifully complicated than she had imagined.
“I wanted to do very orchestral backing vocals and then I wanted Rob Moose to do the strings; that’s as simple as I had wanted it to be,” Marling remembers. “What Ethan Johns, who was my original producer, what he was very good at, was finding emotional peaks and supporting them. It’s like having a really good literary editor, who refines that moment, the punchline moment to the essence of what it should be.”
Noting that the two records that precede this work – Song for Our Daughter and 2017’s Semper Femina – felt “very delicate, very easy to perform solo,” Patterns in Repeat reignited in Marling a desire to perform with a cast of musicians again, and eventually, create a band-focused album to add to the catalogue.
For now though, Marling is very much in the throes of Patterns in Repeat and the observations she has made on life, relationships and her place within it all, as a result. Life’s unpredictable nature was really thrown into perspective for Marling as she embarked on her motherhood journey, while also becoming more aware of her own parents’ mortality and the speed at which life seems to move once you graduate from young adulthood into a fully fledged, grown up space.
“I think you reach a certain point where you are definitively ‘an adult’,” Marling says. “In my experience, my parents’ friends are dying and it’s alarming and perhaps quite new to our generation, because we are children of boomers who were older when they had kids. Certainly in my case, my mum was 44 when she had me.”
“We’re dealing with that at a different stage than they would have dealt with their own parents. There is a sort of clarity with adulthood, in the sense that you have to maybe start to button up your act. There is also that sense of life just moving very quickly. I did have a bit of a revelation where I was like, ‘I need to have confidence in my own ability to articulate,’ not just in lyrical terms, but also in managing the production of the record. I really didn’t have any time to waste, so it was a lot of me being like, ‘Just keep going, I know what I’m doing.’”
Patterns in Repeat thrives in its deliberate nature – there is nothing about this album that feels out of place or unplanned – and it’s because of this that the listener could only assume that Marling herself has happened upon a moment of calm amongst the chaos of bringing new life, and now watching her daughter grow into her own person.
Speaking on the autobiographical nature of her work, Marling notes that albums are a “finished product” of a series of emotional journeying and journalling. Thoughts, memories, observations on a period, brought together and presented in a way that can be logged as a permanent piece of work for her to revisit.
“They are chronological chapters of a life,” she says. “I recently found a box, a fireproof chest, that I had shipped back from LA when I was living there, I left it in my parents’ attic. I completely forgot about it. It contained all of my photos from tours, SLR photos; all of my journals that had never been diaries, but had been places where I’d written lyrics or written things I’d underlined in books.
“There were about 100 journals and I’d gone through about 20 of them when I got this incredibly strong urge to throw them on a fire! I think I will. I have a bit of a problem with this, with objects and their power over me! I used to move furniture around a lot, which everyone does, but I’d do it compulsively. There’s something to me that just feels so incredibly poignant and perfect, that albums are the finished product of all of that work I did in those journals; therefore, the journals don’t need to exist, and there should be no chance of anyone ever seeing them. Seeing the working out. The topline is the only thing that is left.”
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Thinking about the present, the past, and the uncertain future, Marling has found a new emotional anchor with Patterns in Repeat. She speaks of the album with optimism and a smile spread across her face, as she remembers different moments of creating the work; both at home on her own, and then with the players we hear across the project.
Committing to the process and seeing it through is one thing; maintaining the balance between the sense of normal you’ve known as an artist, and the new needs and challenges that come with becoming a mother, is another.
For Marling, she has found a way to bring both elements of her life together in a way that fulfils her, creatively and personally.
“In the context of my career, when I had a baby I was like, ‘What is the point of going back to doing music and trying to work again, when I’ve got this amazing privilege to be able to stay at home?’” she explains.
“I found the balance between those two things. I think I realised that having taken a bit of a retrospective look at my career… the point is that you are representing a slice of a feminine experience of life. It would make sense that you would continue to represent that, but just at the level of which you are capable.”
This isn’t to say that Marling hasn’t found herself completely overwhelmed by the experience; namely, by the pressures new parents, mothers especially, can put on themselves to protect and uplift their children in the best way possible.
As Marling explains, her journey so far has taught her more about the complexities of being human.
“You can’t dwell on the paradoxes of it all,” she says. “I am now in the toddler stage, [and] realise that there will be influences in their experience of life that you have no control over, that will affect them for the rest of their lives. I just hope they do in minor ways.
“Equally, seeing that and how circumstance intervenes in the experiences of a child, it makes you profoundly sympathetic or empathetic to your parents and how they were able to offer you a perfect childhood, or not. The fact that everyone, no matter how perfectly or imperfectly they come into the world, they’re all broken beings… you do start to have a lot of grace for everybody and their experience. It gives you a lot to think about.”
Laura Marling’s Patterns in Repeat is out now.
