Laura Marling: 'I Deliberately Tell Things at Arm's Length' | Music | The

Laura Marling The Observer Laura Marling: 'I deliberately tell things at arm's length' Laura Marling tells Sarah Boden about her second album, I Speak Because I Can, and about seeing her personal life dissected in the press Sarah Boden Saturday 6 March 2010 19.07 EST "I'm almost an entirely different person to the one I was when I wrote the first album," says Laura Marling, smoking prodigiously on the patio of a King's Cross pub. Then, the singer-songwriter was a pale-faced, chronically shy 17-year-old keen on grungy T-shirts, mulishly determined not to be gussied up for popular consumption. Her 2008 Mercury-nominated debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, saw her pushed, blinking, into the full-beam of acclaim. Marling was heralded as a precocious young talent, and her striking lyricism and graceful delivery gave rise to flattering Joni Mitchell comparisons. The LP was produced by her then-boyfriend Charlie Fink, frontman of the folksy pop group Noah and the Whale, because her lack of confidence meant she couldn't express ideas to a stranger. It speaks volumes that Marling, who has just turned 20, chose to make her new record with Ethan Johns, producer also of the Kings of Leon and Rufus Wainwright. Titled I Speak Because I Can, the 10-song set has a fuller, more robust sound, and sees Marling tenderly trace the arcs of relationships with former lovers, as well as the importance of her Hampshire family roots and the jagged conflicts of womanhood and marriage. There's no breast-beating here, more an exquisite quality of guarded observation that lingers long after the record has finished. In the flesh, she looks like she's been redrawn with a stronger outline. She has makeup on, for starters, and her hair colour has changed from white blond to a sombre brunette. The intonation of her voice is clear and deliberate but deeper than you'd expect from her crystalline singing. "I didn't want to wear makeup then," she explains, "because I didn't want to give in to that. It was all because I wasn't at ease with myself." But the darker barnet wasn't a premeditated image change, she insists, simply the result of covering up a DIY bleaching that turned her locks blue and crusty. Marling admits to being an odd kid. The youngest of three sisters, she felt out of place at her Quaker school in Reading. She moved to London aged 16 and befriended "other weirdos who were just like me". This meant a cadre of young musicians including Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn who formed a nu-folk scene around a Chelsea pub, Bosun's Locker, where Marling found her home singing with Noah and the Whale before striking out on her own. Although her reluctance to lead a nine-to-five existence pushed her towards an unconventional lifestyle, endearingly, Marling is very old-fashioned. She is a (her words) "wet blanket" who eschews drugs and clubbing in favour of dinner parties at home in Shepherd's Bush. She abhors our modern-day sexual sensationalism and the media's destructive obsession with kiss-and-tells and, to boot, is an incurable romantic who loves the heroines of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. While her two albums evoke an empathy with the lovelorn and spiritually wounded, she doesn't perpetuate the wearisome persona of a musician who's suffered for their art. "I've been very fortunate. My parents bought me a guitar and my dad taught me. I went to a good school where I had a music scholarship and was able to learn music and not much else. I've had a pretty easy ride, I have to say." If her songs have a tendency to bleakness, Marling says, it's because she's most productive when low. Lyrically, though, they have beguiling layers of subterfuge. "I definitely tell things at arm's length but that is conscious. No part of me wants everybody to know what's going on." Which must have made it all the harder when the wilting of her love affair with Fink was laid bare after Noah and the Whale's lump-in-your-throat break-up album The First Days of Spring came out last summer. "I had a copy of the album, which was very nice of him to send me, but I just wasn't expecting it [the public dissection of their break-up]". Worse still was the leering, flippant tone that music scribes used to write about it. "When I opened up a magazine it was heartbreaking. I was an 18-year-old when it was written. It made me realise that journalists don't give a shit. Why would they?" Momentarily shame-faced, I ask whether the chart triumphs of Noah and the Whale, and more recently Mumford and Sons, have made her contemplate the extent of her ambition. "I've been thinking about it. Thinking about my life plan…as one does," she says, mock-portentously. She has a third album, which she also plans to record with Johns, pencilled in for release in the autumn. Are you prolific? I ask. "Fuck, no," she says with bluster, demurring that it's been two-and-a-half years since she made her debut. "But I've had to remember that with the first album I didn't want to be in lots of magazines and didn't want makeup. These things I now enjoy. But I still don't want to be anything other than a musician. I'm happy with the success I've had because I made an album, and I've made a second album. That's really exciting. Who gets to do that?".

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