Hot Press meets Laura Marling

Laura Marling can vividly recall the arduous day two years ago when she finally decided that she’d had her fill of touring with other musicians. A wriggling Gallic worm was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“My band and I had to sit in a bus for about 12 hours in a car park behind a French venue in the middle of nowhere during a rainy, cold, grey day,” the 23-year-old folk star says, shuddering at the memory. “It was horrible. The only thing we could find to entertain us was a worm.”
How did that work exactly?
“We found this worm on the tarmac and we made a music video for it,” she laughs. “God, it was the most tragic day, honestly. That’s when I decided I just couldn’t tour in a bus anymore. I couldn’t be surrounded like that.”
She pulls on a low-tar cigarette and shakes her head.
“It was… inhumane.”
Prettily blond, softly-spoken and slightly posh (her father’s a baronet), Marling doesn’t come across like an easily-amused type. Undoubtedly hugely talented, her songs sound very much like the work of a serious and solitary soul. Would it be safe to surmise that she’s not a people person?
“Well, I’m not Johnny Socialite, but I find people very stimulating and interesting,” she says. “That’s an awful way of saying it, but I have great friends here and a few great friends in California. I just found towards the end of touring the last record that it got so complicated, and there were so many people, that I just couldn’t cope with it. I didn’t like it at all. So I just took it back to zero, and now I tour on my own.”
You get the sense that Laura is strong-willed. She has the Marling family crest tattooed on her right wrist and the family motto inked on her left, which translates from Latin as “We are prey to none.”
“I’m quite fierce,” she admits. “I don’t lose it, but I have quite a strong sense of what I believe is wrong and right, and I’m not ashamed to pull people up when I think they’re behaving badly. I don’t know if I’m that good at being told off, though, so that might be my temper. That might set me off.”
We’re sitting outside a restaurant in a run-down area of East London. It’s on a drab and dreary red-bricked street, real Martin Amis territory, miles away from the usual trendy music industry haunts and hotspots. She chose the location, but more likely for convenience than to make any kind of point. When Marling lived in London she was mostly based around Kew and Shoreditch, but she’s staying with friends nearby.
“I think all cities are kind of awful,” she sighs. “I’m originally from Hampshire, but I lived in London for six years. Yeah, all cities are kind of awful, manmade disasters. Functioning disasters.”
She relocated to sunny California last year, swapping her flat on the top floor of a terraced townhouse here for a small apartment in east LA. She lives close enough to the desert to satisfy her inner country-girl.
“It was a life decision as much as anything to leave England. I wanted to be somewhere else. I’m very lucky to have a visa because I work there a lot. I feel very at peace there. I’m near enough to LA that I’m essentially living in the city, but I also don’t have that constant weird energy that so much stuff is going on around me that I need to be a part of. So I get a lot more
work done.”
Is she well-known in America?
“‘Underground’ is the polite way of saying it,” she smiles. “I play very small shows in America, apart from LA and New York obviously, but the people who come to them really feel like they’re a part of it. It’s nice, I like that. I get a real kick out of it. There’s also the sense in America that is lacking in Europe, which is a kind of a shamelessness about being creative. There is no shame attached to it. California is a nice place to be a creative person.”
Laura has been back home in England for a couple of weeks, mainly to oversee the music she composed for the RSC’s new Stratford production of As You Like It (“It’s not all that big a deal; you know, it’s not a musical”) but also to begin the promotion for her forthcoming fourth album. Thus this interview. She tells me it’s the part of her job she likes least.
“Making a record is always exciting; getting it done and realising that sort of vision, for want of a less awful word. The idea of – and please don’t take offence – doing the game again is not so exciting. But it is getting easier, actually, as I get older.”

Although she only turned 23 in February, Laura Marling has achieved a musical wisdom beyond her years. She started early. Her father owned a small Hampshire recording studio – clients during her childhood included The Las and Black Sabbath – and taught her how to play guitar when she was just five.
She grew up with her three sisters, surrounded by music and musicians, in a house soundtracked by “the trinity of Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.” A precocious talent, she was barely 18 when her quiet and understated debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim was released in 2007. The more strident I Speak Because I Can followed in 2010, and then came 2011’s dark and reflective A Creature I Don’t Know.
Along the way she won a Brit Award (‘Best Female Solo Artist’ of 2011) and was twice nominated for the Mercury Music Prize (for the first two albums). She also recorded a couple of limited-edition singles with Jack White in his famous Third Man studio in Nashville – cover versions of Neil Young’s ‘Needle & The Damage Done’ and Jackson C. Frank’s ‘Blues Run The Game’.
“Jack’s amazing,” she says. “I can’t say I know him all that well because it was only about an hour I spent with him. He’s a very rare bird; he’s a very important champion of music.”
Easily her most mature and accomplished work to date, Marling’s latest album Once I Was An Eagle was recorded over ten days last summer at regular producer and instrumentalist Ethan Johns’ Three Crows Studio in North Hollywood. She kept studio personnel to a bare minimum, with just Dom Monks on engineering duties and her lifelong friend Ruth de Turberville on cello.
She credits Johns – whose previous production gigs include Kings Of Leon, Ryan Adams and The Vaccines – with the sparse and intimate sound of the record.
“Our roles are quite set. I write my songs and he takes the time to understand them enough to serve them in the way he sees fit. So this record – more than any other because we did it without the band and there was nobody else in studio – is just as much his as it is mine, because he did everything to it. I wrote and recorded it, and was there for the entire process, and gave my two cents or whatever, but essentially he did most of it.”
Featuring 16 songs of love, loss, regret and compromise, she explains that it’s a concept album of sorts.
“The narrative is based around a central character, Rosie, going on a slightly allegorical journey, as it were. But the story is not really important, it’s whatever you get from the album that’s important. It’s about the relentless pursuit of understanding one’s place in the world, and what makes a good person, and why a good person does bad things. So… same old.”
She prefers not to discuss her personal life – though she reveals that she lives alone in LA – but it’s public knowledge that Marling’s old flames include Noah and The Whale’s Charlie Fink, who wrote an entire album about their break-up, and Marcus Mumford of ‘...and Sons’ fame. On the new album’s title-track she sings, “I will not be a victim of romance/ I will not be a victim of circumstance/ Chance or circumstance or romance or any man/ Who could get his dirty little hands on me.”
How autobiographical are the songs? She hesitates for a moment before replying.
“They are autobiographical in a sense because I can only write from my personal experience, but it’s easy to say they’re not because they’re manipulated, and experience is expanded. So it’s not my story, but it is my experience.”
Some songwriters hone and craft their songs obsessively. Others claim that the work comes through them. Creatively, Marling is somewhere in the middle.
“To some extent, I do feel like that is a good way of saying it, that songs come through me. But that sort of passes off this responsibility to something other. It does come through my conscious thought. I listen back to the record when we’re mastering, and things shine out at me that I remember thinking about, but I don’t remember putting into the song. So it’s an unconscious process from a conscious base. And the guitar playing is the conscious bit of it. I work on my guitar playing: that’s the only thing I practice.”

The album’s prevailing mood of melancholia notwithstanding, Laura laughs when I ask if she ever uses alcohol or drugs as an artistic tool. You can tell that she’s growing up fast.
“Nah, I’m not a huge drinker,” she states. “I like wine. I used to smoke a lot of weed, but I don’t anymore. It’s one of those things that you think is useful, but it’s not. It doesn’t really get you anywhere. I used to feel that you had to induce yourself into a state of mania to write songs. Life does that anyway, so I don’t need any substances to help me be in constant battle.”
Are any of the new songs difficult to sing live?
“No, they’re not,” she says. “Difficult wouldn’t be the right word. Some of them I find quite emotional to sing, but that’s a good driving force. I have to play them every night for the next year, so that’s not too bad.”
Her European and American tours are still being organised, but a series of shows in Australian churches has already been confirmed.
“It’s kind of a small quirky thing, but I’m looking forward to it. First, though, I go back to the States on Friday, and then I fly up to Portland and go down the West Coast playing record shops.”
While she’s relatively successful financially – “I’m able to be a full-time musician, which is a great privilege, so I’m doing okay” – she’s also aware that the music industry spoils are not what they used to be.
“Music’s not going to make you a millionaire anymore, unless you’re a very lucky few,” she shrugs. “I think it will encourage people to go into it for the right reasons. I hope it will. I joined the industry at a time where that was already the fact. Welcome! It’s over!”
Not that she’s especially bothered about fame, money, awards or having radio hits.
“My big ambition is to be good,” she says, softly. “Just to be good. Not amazing, not rubbish, just good.”

Once I Was An Eagle is released on May 24 through Virgin.