Laura Marling
Song For Our Daughter
Chrysalis/Partisan
Listen Below
To the naked eye, Laura Marling, the British folk singer-songwriter, has very little to do with bowling, the most quintessential of American pastimes (combining eating, drinking, and extended bouts of sitting with short bursts of activity).
But there's a common thread. Every time a bowler comes up to the line, she’s staring at the same 10 pins standing in the same order. But there are variables. The oil on the lane. Which pins have been knocked down. The weight of the ball. The bowler needs to do something she’s done plenty of other times before, repeating the same action but slightly differently. It's also the challenge faced by singer-songwriters, who are mostly using voice, instrument, and words to create songs, a repetitive action performed with subtle variations to make it something completely new each time. Marling finds the right variations on Song For Our Daughter, her sonically intimate seventh album.
Marling has been making albums for over a decade, starting with her 2008 debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim. Since then, she's managed to make an album every year or two, an ambitious pace. Her recent albums, 2015's Short Movie and 2017's Semper Femina, used more production and electric instrumentation, as did 2018's LUMP, a collaboration with Tunng's Mike Lindsay under the name LUMP. But on Song For Our Daughter, she's using the traditional musical tools of folk and making subtle adjustments to each roll of the album's beautiful ten songs.
"Alexandra" has 1970s country-rock energy, a cross between Linda Ronstadt and Carole King. Marling's voice carries the melody, as it does across the entire album, a guitar strum filling in the rhythm, but a quiet electric guitar works in the background, humbly supporting everything else, a gentle counter-melody that's not a folk move, but feels more like something The Band might have pulled out of their repertoire of tricks. It's a Marling track—her voice is unmistakable—but it doesn't sound like a rehash of her previous work. Instead it feels like a synthesis of her older and more recent albums.
"Blow by Blow" recalls Joni Mitchell (auditioning this album, my wife frequently asked if Mitchell had something new out), built upon subtle piano and strings that will hit you like tears welling up. Marling's voice soars here, taking advantage of the formality of the arrangement to craft something that reads as folk, but that also feels rooted in traditional pop, almost like something Barbra Streisand might have once attempted. The strings return for the title track, which has a similar classic sound, but this time offset with a little more folk instrumentation, anchoring the tune a bit more in Marling's earlier work.
Subtlety is sometimes used as a proxy for dull. Song For Our Daughter isn't dull; it's certainly mellow, but that's what makes the subtlety pop. The little electric guitar runs and accordion flourishes feel huge when peeking out of Marling's quiet songs. The low-key production also allows Marling's voice to take its rightful place at the center of each song, on a collision course with just the right pin.
Notable Tracks: "Alexandra" | "Blow by Blow" | "Hold Down"
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