Laura Marling The Observer : 'Americans – they're just a lot more poetic'

Singer-songwriter Laura Marling talks about lyrics, love, her new album and why she decided to move from to LA

'There's so much excitement in this country': Laura Marling at home in Los Angeles, March 2013. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer

Tom Lamont Saturday 27 April 2013 19.04 EDT

Three or four times a week Laura Marling strolls from her home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles to the adjacent neighbourhood of Los Feliz; a two-mile walk along Sunset Boulevard. On the way the British musician, who will soon release her fourth album, passes a mural that's famous for its appearance on the cover of an old Elliott Smith record. Otherwise this is an unlovely stretch, remarkable for its tremor-ruined pavement, its epic waits at traffic lights. "We're more than halfway," the 23-year-old promises. Every so often her blond hair and the shawl she's wrapped up in flutter about in the wake of a hurtling truck. Marling thinks she might be the only person in all of Los Angeles to make this walk routinely, voluntarily. That suits her. "Soon we'll come to a bookshop," she says. "I usually buy a book there. Then I'll get a massive coffee. Probably induce a panic attack. Read the entire book, go home. This is my ridiculous life, and I love that I don't have to explain it to anyone. I've had to do a lot less explaining myself out here." She notes the contradiction and laughs: she has been explaining herself, under my orders, for the duration of the walk so far. Because whenever I mentioned to anyone that I was flying out to meet Marling in LA, there was surprise, sometimes outright disbelief – that Marling (so reserved) would relocate to a town that's legendary for its brass; that Marling (so pale) would choose to bronze under the Pacific sun; that Marling (so English) would leave our shores at all. She had been a Londoner since moving out of her parents' home in Hampshire at 16, living in Kew and then Shoreditch while releasing a string of albums, evolving a distinct and irresistible take on contemporary folk. A debut record Alas, I Cannot Swim (2008), quiet, poignant and persuasive, led to the bolder and more strident (2010), then to the reflective A Creature I Don't Know (2011). This trio of releases established Marling as British musical treasure, twice Mercury-nominated, once Brit-awarded. The new album, , is to my ears her best and most coherent to date, a 16-track, one-plot blockbuster in which Marling explores the settlements and compromises and (finally) rewards of new love. Having finished recording it last year, she gathered some essentials – a pile of books, a dozen CDs, two guitars, a small keyboard, iPad, amp – and caught a plane. Since arriving she has bought an American car and been rear-ended twice. She wears summer dresses, has a tan. Laura Marling: how did this happen? She says she's always envied America's space, its geographical diversity. "There's so much excitement in this country." New York, "the most coarse and terrifying place", was never an option. She fell for the west coast while touring up and down it last year and imagined she'd move to southern Oregon or northern California. Los Angeles came into the equation "for practical purposes. I had to be sort of contactable. And if I didn't live in a city where I could easily be sociable I wouldn't be." She smiles. "I'm told it's good for you, being sociable." Away up the road there's a sign for a bar called Cheetah's Girls Girls Girls. From a nearby billboard a robot superhero, one of the Transformers, advertises two-for- one calling cards. A dozen or so blocks along Sunset a grown man spends his days moonwalking back and forth for the amusement of drivers stuck in jams. "It's nice," Marling says of her LA life, "not feeling isolated by having a strange job." This feeling began to trouble her in England. "I live on this delicate balance between normality and the bizarre world of music. I sit with my toes curled over the edge. And though that's very nice, because I can have the best of both worlds, it can be difficult to place oneself." Living in London she felt increasingly hemmed in, bored by the nightly choice of "Netflix or pub" and worried about whether she was giving her friends enough of her time. Touring the west coast last year she felt that if she fancied company there was always someone to talk to (a bar prop, a local with a story) and then, if she preferred to spend time on her own, nobody asked why. "If you're someone like me, who likes to be alone but doesn't want to be lonely, this is a very good place to be. England is not. I think I can say that." We've arrived at her bookshop, where the volumes displayed in the window are arranged not by subject, or by genre, but by colour, which seems a very LA touch. At a sleepy cafe nearby they're playing Chad & Jeremy and selling fresh juice. We stop for a drink. It sounds like she's put a lot of thought into the move, I say. "I have the convenience of time, and I'm not dirt-poor either. It gives me the opportunity to be able to sit and consider my life. That's a luxury. At the same time, I don't know – I wish I didn't think about everything so much." She gives a pantomime sigh, pats aside her fringe and says: "Oh! To not need cognitive justification for every single thing. Wouldn't that be a life?" Maybe it prompts a resolution. On the walk home, whenever the lights take too long to change, Marling announces "We're doing this!" – and leads us out between the speeding cars. SShhee hhaass a pprrooppeerr AAmmeerriiccaann aaddddrreessss, a house number in the thousands on a residential road the length of Oxford Street. Her building was a factory in the 1920s and now it's full of pleasant, compact apartments; also actors. Marling guesses she's the only non-thesp in residence. We watch a neighbour step off the front porch, out for a jog wearing sunglasses, plunging vest and smog mask. Inside Marling's place, neat and mostly kitchen, there are various markers of west coast living. A wooden table was made for her on Venice Beach by a carpenter called Jesus. There's a 1970s copy of Playboy lying about and a jar on the windowsill, heaped with cigarette ends, that once contained organic tahini. Signs of England aren't obvious, but they're there – a thumbed Wordsworth Classic of As You Like It (Marling has written songs for the RSC's new Stratford production) and a crossword torn from a Saturday supplement. Her parents posted it over and Marling tacked it to the fridge. A reminder of home. Mother Judi and father Charlie are back in Hampshire, where Marling was born in 1990, the youngest of three daughters. She has a very early memory of crawling over knots of speaker cabling. The family lived on a farm near Wokingham and Charlie ran a small recording studio there. In 1988 Liverpool band the La's came to stay, recording their famed anthem, There She Goes, on site. When Marling was six months old Black Sabbath pitched up. Such visits didn't last. Her father, Marling says, chose not to bring in computers or digitise the studio's setup when others did. "And that was the end of the studio." They were a musical family, instruments around and Joni Mitchell always on. When Charlie taught his daughter to play the guitar he did so by leading her through Neil Young's The Needle and the Damage Done. This survey of crippling heroin addiction was strong stuff, perhaps, for a six-year-old, but as Marling cheerfully notes her parents were very liberal. After an unhappy period at school – "I was such a weird teenager" – Marling proposed she chuck in her AS-levels to embark on a musician's life in London. Charlie and Judi gave the nod and Marling moved in with a gang of musicians in Kew. The streamlined legend – in which she appears in our culture in 2008 as a rounded teen troubadour, a prodigy blessed with Joni's wisdom and Dylan's impudence, her shirts sleeveless and her lyrics ticklishly oblique – smooths away, somewhat, an early flub. Starting out, Marling shared stages with and and, like them, sang with a marked London accent. She was let dahn/About tahn, parties went on aw night, and so on. Her tunes were catchy and confessional, great favourites at an event called Way Out West where Marling was a regular, and decent enough to get her a deal with Virgin. But listening back to Marling at 16, she doesn't sound sincere. Jamie T was raised in Wimbledon, Adele on the opposite side of the capital ring, and both found a way to transpose their Londoner's twang into an appealing pop vocal. Marling grew up a country girl; speaks a husky, precise RP; and moreover comes from a family with its own coat of arms. (Her father Charlie is a baronet. For more on this you might turn to a truly harrowing website called thePeerage.com, which offers a "pop-up pedigree" on the Marlings, letting you click back through High Sheriffs, lancers, Liberal MPs and a VC noted for his bravery during the Mahdist revolt.) By the age of 17 Marling was gearing up to make an album and if there was a conflict of influence at this point – home and Hampshire versus a -led vogue for dropped aitches – she turned away from both. Marling looked to America. At her shared flat in Kew someone had played her the spare and whimsical folk of Kentucky's Will Oldham, which she adored. Meanwhile she'd started singing with an emerging London band, , who went heavy on banjo and tambourine. Harking back as well to the Neil she'd been schooled with, the Joni that soundtracked her upbringing, Marling absorbed the lot and adjusted her output. Her vocal dropped a few registers, cockney giving way to a mid-Atlantic burr. Her lyrics became mysterious, less confessional. Marling stepped into the margins of her songs. Alas, I Cannot Swim, produced by Noah and the Whale's frontman, , came out days after her 18th birthday and made her name. I first saw her perform in early 2008 as a warm-up act, contending with a chatty crowd and a creaky door in a north London church. Six months later I watched her headline for a devoutly silent 3,000 in King's Cross. In between she'd been to the 2008 Mercury awards. Two years later I Speak Because I Can, her second album, was also nominated and on both occasions Marling performed at the Mercury ceremony looking down, up, left, right – anywhere but out at the audience. Shy on stage, awkward during her gigs' interludes for banter, Marling has often given the impression of a distant performer. The songs, heavier on fiction than fact, only widened the remove. Time and again Marling has said in interviews: I don't make music to be known. She has had to explain to her own mother that, when I sing a line about a mum, it probably isn't you. "That's my trick," she tells me. "Weaving emotion around personification, of beasts, of wilds. There's a level of conscious removal. I don't see a time where I'm ever going to sit and sing with my heart on my sleeve." And yet, the new record… On the cover of Once I Was an Eagle Marling is photographed lying on her belly, apparently nude. Listening to its 16 tracks there's a corresponding sense of exposure. "I cannot love/ I want to be alone," she sings, and: "I cured my skin/ Now nothing gets in." And: "I can't seem to say/ I'd like you to stay". The album is steeped in such frustrations until, finally, there's a turn in the penultimate track. "How does he make love seem sweet?/ Isn't that a heavy feat." In the closer there's a repudiation of 15 tracks' worth of over- thinking. "Words are sleazy/ My love is better done." Marling seems closer to the surface on this record than before. "Than before, certainly," she says. The studio sessions were intimate, just her and her producer , no band. "This album is definitely a step towards being more… plain in my songwriting, I suppose. As I've gotten older, more comfortable with myself, I've become more comfortable channelling honesty into songwriting." "More comfortable" captures it. Marling at 23 is unrecognisable from the shrinking 18-year-old I watched in 2008, singing in a church with her eyes shut. When she won a Brit award (best female, 2011) she felt the need to introduce herself on stage. "My name's Laura," she murmured to the 5 million watching. At the time I thought it was nicely done, a droll acknowledgement of an improbable victory. Difficult to imagine her being so meek now. Marling has invited me into her home, shown me around, cooked lunch. She's been poised, a joke teller, no-nonsense. "Come or stay as you please," she says, off to attend an errand in the garden. I stay and lightly snoop, checking the piles of books (Roth, Hemingway, How to Worry Less About Money, Sophocles in an Hour) and drifting to the fridge to inspect the mounted crossword. Marling always has one of these on the go; she spends her days summoning those tight, thorny little phrases that make her music so special, and perhaps that feeds into a talent for crossword solutions. When she returns to the room she joins me, takes a moment, and shouts: "Enzyme!" There aren't many gaps left once she's penned it in. "Lacking creative talent (10)" needs an answer. And 13 down, "Subject to minute examination (5, 5, 3, 10)", is missing a first word. Something under the microscope… There have long been attempts by journalists to minutely examine Laura Marling's personal life. Mostly hopeless: she tends to bat off inquiries. That song's not about me. Nor that one. It's artistic licence! But this new album is by her own admission plainer, more honest. I have questions. That arresting lyric on track five, for instance, aimed at a lover: "Give me something/ Let me go/ Tell me something I don't know." Is that how Marling approaches relationships? Improve me, boyfriend, then get lost? "I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life… You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean?" Doesn't that sort of… "Take the magic out of it?" She laughs. "Yes!" It's that problem of over-thinking things again. "And it's not like I live without love either. Every time I think I've fallen in love, I fall for it. I'm still as much of a fool for it as anyone else." She was in a relationship with Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink when she was 17. Their split was enough of a rupture for him to write his band's second album on the subject. Marling was pals with her next boyfriend, , for years before they got together. He was her drummer, later her bloke, later her ex- bloke, and now he's an industry giant with his band Mumford & Sons; he's married to the actor Carey Mulligan and his picture is on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, piled thick on every newsstand along the walk to Los Feliz. Marling met Fink, met Mumford at the right time. But there was a time limit. "The logical steps that bring you together are the same ones that lead you to parting," Marling says of break-ups. "And you learn." Diffident Londoners aren't really her type any more, she says. "Americans – they're just a lot more poetic. I don't know whether I've sort of fallen out of love with English charm, the reservedness of it…" Is she in a relationship at the moment? Marling prefers not to say. I ask if she feels content, at least. "I made an important decision, which was to pursue happiness. Rather than accept unhappiness. That's why I'm here, and it's great. I'm in a very good place in my life." Her explanations for moving to LA – the promise of adventure, the need for escape – are compelling. Still I can't help wondering if romance played a part. The most intriguing lyric on Once I Was an Eagle is one addressed abroad from England: "Hey there/ New friend across the sea/ If you figure things out/ Will you figure in me?" Marling chooses to stay quiet about whether she's in a relationship right now and that's allowed. Instead she tells me: "There are some things too precious and important to be shared candidly." It's like that crossword solution on the fridge, something under the microscope. Almost an answer. But not quite. Laura Beatrice Marling (born 1 February 1990) is a British folk singer-songwriter. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 , and was nominated for the same award at the 2012, 2014, 2016, and . Born in Berkshire in southeast England, Marling joined her older sisters in London at 16, to pursue a career in music. She played with a number of groups, and released her debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim in 2008. Her first album, her second album I Speak Because I Can, and her fourth album Once I Was an Eagle were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2008, 2010, and 2013, respectively. "Laura Marling: 'Americans – they're just a lot more poetic'". . London. Laura Beatrice Marling (born 1 February 1990) is a British folk singer-songwriter. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brit Awards and was nominated for the same award at the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 Brit Awards. Marling joined her older sisters in London at age 16 to pursue a career in music. Marling began recording songs for the album shortly after completing the solo tour for Once I Was an Eagle. The songs were written in the US, reflecting Marling's experience of living in Los Angeles. However, after recording a new album, she felt unsatisfied with the result, and made the decision to scrap most of the songs written in that period. "Laura Marling: 'Americans – they're just a lot more poetic'". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 May 2013. “They take a lot more preparation than I anticipated!†​ she explains. “But in a good way. I have to remember what it’s like to be a novice and that’s really helped with my own guitar playing.â€Â​ Comfortably tucked away in London with her middle sister and boyfriend – her oldest sister and niece live just a street away – Laura Marling’s love affair with America has run its course, not least since the country’s 45th president slithered into power: “It has lost its mystery and become a bit more sinister now that it’s Trump-addled.â€​