British singer-songwriter Laura Marling was just 18 years old when she released her debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim in 2008. Over the past 12 years, she’s been nominated three times for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize, moved from the U.K. to Los Angeles and back again, and has recently begun coursework for a masters degree in psychoanalysis.
On Friday, Marling released her seventh studio album; it’s called Song For Our Daughter, and it was originally supposed to come out late this summer before stay-at-home orders were issued in several states. “In light of the change to all our circumstances, I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union,” she said in a statement issued last week. “An album, stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it, is essentially a piece of me, and I’d like for you to have it.”
On the album’s title and making art for a younger version of herself
The title comes from the central song on the album and it’s likely somewhat an homage to Letter to My Daughter, the Maya Angelou book, which is a series of essays to a fictional daughter, or to a kind of a wide, broad idea of a daughter; a younger generation of women. And I wrote that song [the title track] with that sort of thought in mind — I’m not, myself, a mother but the idea of a maternal lineage.
That song was written thinking about how I would have armed myself, a younger version of myself, against some of the experiences, or the accumulation of experiences that one accrues as a young woman in the world. It’s fairly on the nose, I suppose, in some respects. I started my career when I was 16, so I’m now in the position at 30 where I can see people of the ages of 16 to 21 and see how incredibly young they are in the most brilliant, vibrant way, and realize that I was so young. And what an incredibly difficult thing it is to be young and to make lots of very important decisions. So that is just a product of the time of life that I am at.
Posted from: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/11/832052963/laura-marling-on-maya-angelou-and-arming-a-younger-generation-of-women
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