Laura Marling: 'Americans – They're Just a Lot More Poetic'
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Laura Marling The Observer Laura Marling: '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 London 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 I Speak Because I Can (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, Once I Was an Eagle, 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 Jamie T and Adele 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.