'I Don't Know What The Fuck I'm Doing'

18 August 2015 | 2:39 pm | Carley Hall

“It’s like the children of baby boomers are all throwing their hands up in the air, if they’ve got the time and privilege to do so.”

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"I would quite like to just make music and not have anybody talk about it directly to me. That would be a nice sort of way of existing, but that's not possible."

Forthright statements such as this are slightly at odds with the modern music world, where songs are quickly recorded and sent on their way, and a response or critique imparted almost instantly. Such, however, is the frankness of Laura Marling. Speaking on a fortuitously sunny summer morning in London, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter is ruminating on the virtues of being somewhat anonymous as a creator.

"I would quite like to just make music and not have anybody talk about it directly to me."

Her candid remark may come as a surprise to some, given her immediate success upon the release of her Mercury Prize-nominated debut Alas I Cannot Swim at the milestone age of 18, followed by three arguably faultless albums and an obvious love of playing. But her latest release, Short Movie, and the stories that preceded its making, may hold some clues.

For some years Marling had been living in LA, where people "let the light come in a bit too much to close it off again", and the name Laura Marling didn't carry the same gravitas as it did elsewhere. Occupied by yoga, writing, hanging with transient poetic souls and conscience-rattling drives into the desert all but saw music shelved for six months, forcing Marling to look inward and ask some very big questions of herself and others, while acknowledging some sobering truths.

So how much of what we hear on Short Movie can be attributed to these life-questioning moments of Marling's overseas jaunt?

"It is based in non-fiction, so there's elements of my personality that are more akin to the dramatisation of life experiences and that stuff," she explains. "I'm aware of what elements of it are true and what aren't. And I would never put out something I was not comfortable with.

"The funny thing with this album is people's own reflections on it. That seems the most interesting thing to me. It's weirdly already the album I'm most attached to. But for some people it's really got to them. So I think for some people it touches something that I didn't really intend to, like a sore point or something. So sometimes that's difficult because I get the projection of somebody else's story in the record."

The liberty that fans felt in sharing their thoughts and reactions to Short Movie were welcome to Marling, but they were also in stark contrast to the freedom she felt while away, where the off-duty musician revelled in the freedom of no one really knowing her, and the sense of being reborn that goes with it as a traveller. That same anonymity is what eventually forced Marling to take a closer look at some truths about life as a 20-something that were bubbling away under the surface.

"I think it was — as far as I can tell in my personal experience rather than my professional experience of what people's ideas of what the record is — I live in a generation of people, of 25-year-olds, who don't know what the fuck they're doing, and I'm just one of them," she admits. "It's like the children of baby boomers are all throwing their hands up in the air, if they've got the time and privilege to do so."

"I joined the ‘quarter-life crisis’ gang because I was with my contemporaries who also had no job. "

Privilege is one thing Marling could be said to have had, if given a black and white view of things. Growing up in pastoral England as the daughter of a baronet and studio owner father and music teacher mother, forging ties with nu-folk scene-makers such as Noah & The Whale and Mumford & Sons on her move to London would seem a natural progression for the gifted musician. The quick ascension from supporting Jamie T and Adam Green from The Moldy Peaches, to playing major festivals and chalking up plenty of award nods for her impressive catalogue of albums from one so young is not to be sniffed at. But having earned the time to "just be" while living in LA gave Marling the chance to ponder the pros and cons of isolation.

"I guess we're not taught, unless you went to university — well, I don't know because I didn't go — unless you're taught critical thinking all of a sudden you're alone on the planet and you start questioning everything, and the world starts falling in on itself fucking quickly. But there's remedies.

 "I also periodically need a 'bringing back down to earth', a kind of looking in the mirror saying your name thing, which is big in LA but hard to do if your name is also your business. So it was really important to go and not have my musical ego with me. But it's definitely back now."

Travelling often inspires one to create, but for Marling it had the curious effect of doing the opposite. Forcing herself to look inward and elsewhere, anywhere but at her musical self and what she had achieved, lumbered the chanteuse with the burden of her "quarter-life crisis", and it wasn't unusual for her thoughts to ponder giving up on music altogether.

"I was close," she admits. "And I think it was a really good thing for me, if you willingly step away from anything musical for eight months. And I think that was where I joined the 'quarter-life crisis' gang because I was with my contemporaries who also had no job. And in a weird way it was kind of uniting but really conflicting.

"In a funny way my career and my job, it's this thing that's very rare; there's not many people who have done that, and that's great, but it's a shared experience only with the people that are travelling with you. I felt really part of my time in the struggle with the other 25-year-olds also not doing anything!"

Marling admits she'll likely be deconstructing her experience for some time, but back in London things are largely back to normal. Having only recently reached the quarter mark of her life, and given these soul-questioning crossroads usually strike us down in our middle age, the dreaded "midlife crisis", is she worried that such an experience will happen again?

"I literally bring a voyeuristic emotional person every night."

"I think the benefit of being part of the baby boomer generation is that we've seen the truth of the world in [our] 20s because you're forced to. And I think otherwise the generation before had to wait until their 40s when their kids were old enough to walk themselves. So in a way we're kind of saved."

Although the experience left Marling feeling at sea for a long while in approaching work on a fifth album, the fog obviously eventually lifted. But with such a wealth of stories and clarity came a sound so unlike her previous albums. The same sweet voice is there, as is the guitar balladeering, albeit in fewer quantities, but a metallic buzz and noise fill what would normally be glorious space on a Laura Marling album. Such a change in sound mirrored the change she felt, and the difficulty in writing it.

"This one was a bit more difficult to write. I think you can tell by listening to it. When I was listening back I could tell it would be difficult. Not that the content was difficult, but just because it's not consistent with the other ones. It was very different. I haven't listened to it for over a year. I had a lot of stuff that had been floating around my brain for like eight months. I'd been physically writing but I had to get my chops back."

Marling will be able to give those chops a good warm-up as she gets ready to embark on an international tour, at the end of which she'll pay Australia a visit. Even though her approach to writing this album may have tarried her usual process, playing her songs, all of them, is still a powerful and rewarding experience for Marling, and one that offers insights and that same chance to escape, even if her feet are now planted back in her old London.

"It's quite a powerful thing and I can see the magnitude of songs' ability to make you feel exactly as I did when I wrote them," she reasons. "It makes you stop and wonder if it's worth doing it every night. But it's also the prime example of emotional voyeurism; I literally bring a voyeuristic emotional person every night. So in some ways it's very fulfilling, and in other ways it's very traumatising."