Laura Marling on Parenthood, Psychoanalysis, and the Powerful Intimacy of Her Upcoming Eighth Album ‘Patterns in Repeat’

In the very first seconds of Laura Marling’s upcoming album, we hear the rustle of distant footsteps. Then comes Marling’s own voice, chatting to someone in her studio, before a folksy strum of acoustic guitar announces the beginning of the track. There’s the giggle of an infant, followed by Marling’s own laughter, as she launches into “Child of Mine,” a devastatingly beautiful portrait of the very specific experience of becoming a parent during the pandemic that, in Marling’s hands, is deftly transformed into a universal tale of the tumultuous bond between parent and child. (Everyone in the world can relate to that.)

It’s a neat introduction to Marling’s new record, Patterns in Repeat, which charts the emotional topography of becoming a mother—from the highs of postpartum euphoria, to the gradual dawning of how drastically her life had changed, to the deeper philosophical questions it prompted around her own childhood, and balancing her newfound double duties as a mother and an artist. The record was made almost entirely at her home studio in east London, with Marling’s baby daughter bouncing on her knee or crawling at her feet. “You can hear this whole other incidental story happening behind, and the mistakes are left in, but that’s all stuff I like when recording anyway,” she says, breezily. “I’ve never done more than three or four takes of one thing, because I think you then start performing in a different way. It’s all part of my preference as an artist—to not be too precious.”

More startling, perhaps, is that it’s also the eighth album from the 34-year-old musician, who burst onto the British music scene back in 2008 as a teenager, and has barely paused to take a breath since. Patterns in Repeat comes four years after her last release, the prophetically titled Song for Our Daughter, and while the gap can in part be explained by practical concerns—the pandemic, parenthood—it also represented a slowing-down that Marling attributes to getting (relatively) older.

Marling’s music has always felt accomplished beyond her years, so it only makes sense that while the new record feels mature, it’s in more unexpected ways—like the dashes of wry humor sprinkled throughout, or the more freeform structure. On “Caroline,” for example, over a rippling guitar line, she descends into “la la las” and “something somethings,” appearing to lose her lyrical thread.

Of course, Marling is never truly losing her lyrical thread. On Patterns in Repeat, her masterful ability to explore the nuances of friendship, family, love, and loss—and then distill these complex, sweeping ideas into a tidy string of words—is as present as ever. Not least on the album’s gorgeous debut single, “Patterns,” released earlier this week, which touches on understanding, with a profound new clarity, the sacrifices made by her parents during her own childhood. (“And as those years go by they’ll look upon you / Kindly like a friend / A pattern in repeat / And never ends,” she sings.)

“I was high as fuck when I was giving birth,” says Marling, before laughing and clarifying that it was an entirely natural high of oxytocin. “I was, like, sending crazy text messages of joy. But then that wears off and you’re like, actually, now I have to deal with tiredness and chaos, and you hit the next level of the game. You realize you’ve got a huge responsibility for the rest of your life not to fuck it up, and it makes you think about in what ways things might have been fucked up for you or for your siblings. So it’s all of that. It’s something of a cliché, but that’s what it is, really.”

Here, Marling tells Vogue about the unexpected joy of songwriting during early motherhood, how her masters degree in psychoanalysis shaped her new album, and why she’s taking a different approach to touring this time around.

Vogue: It’s been four years since we heard from you. At the beginning of your career, you were releasing albums every year or two like clockwork. First off, do you think there is anything about you as a person or artist that made you so prolific?

Laura Marling: Well, I like keeping busy. And I’m maybe not very good at relaxing, but obviously that’s something different. It’s a combination of that, and also the fact that I’m a bit older. I think in your teens and your 20s, you have a lot of emotional storms happening around you all the time. In your 20s, it becomes a bit slower, but more complex, and in a way more profound. It takes more time to decipher what it is that you are feeling or what’s happening to you. And as much as I’ve tried to deny over the years that what I do is biographical, it’s obvious to me now that it is—but in a very “with a pinch of salt” way.

I’m sure there were some practical reasons as to why this one took a little longer, also, with the pandemic and having your daughter.

Yeah. Song for Our Daughter, the album before, was also four years after the previous record, but that was very much for practical reasons. I left my management company and I had to do all kinds of very boring bureaucratic stuff in order to get back in the studio. With this one, when my daughter was born and I started writing again, I was like, I am going to make an album this year. I booked two weeks of help from my family and friends—I was recording at home, but just to have people baby-wrangling. I thought it would only take two weeks, because that’s as long as it’s ever taken me to record an album, and then it took nine months to make, which was infuriating because I’ve never had to sit with my own voice for nine months, over and over. So I had a lot of… not self-doubt, but I had a lot of time to mull over it all in a way that wasn’t always very helpful. Anyway, we did it. We got it done.

What was it actually like recording the album at home? Was that out of necessity or was it an attempt to try and cultivate a different kind of atmosphere on the record?

I did most of Song for Our Daughter at home as well. I actually moved into a house just before the pandemic that had a studio in the basement that was built by the previous owner.

That’s very handy.

It’s so fucking handy, because I wouldn’t know how to start building a studio. It’s not in my feminine skillset. [Laughs.] So that was good. What that experience revealed to me was that it’s actually really good to have no other input until you’re absolutely sure what you want, so that you can dictate exactly what you want. Making an album is, in its nature, a collaborative process, so you have to find a way to get what you want done without upsetting other people’s very worthy input. And that was much heightened by having a baby and having the restrictions of not being able to leave the house, really. And I enjoyed those restrictions, like having to put her on the floor when I was recording. This is when she was very little, so she couldn’t move around. So there’s a lot of incidental noise on the record of babbling babies and dogs shaking their collar and things like that. It was relatively simple, and the outcome is relatively simple.

Photo: Tamsin Topolski

You said the sound of your own voice started to drive you crazy. Did that extra time fine-tuning the album, without worrying about the costs of renting a studio, end up feeling like a challenge or a blessing?

I think it gave me a lot of time to think about what the point of making an album is these days. I did say to myself—I didn’t say it in any public way—but I said to myself after the last album that there’s no constraint on what length an album could be now that people don’t predominantly make records for vinyl. I know that vinyl is hip or whatever, but it’s a bit of tat now, as far as I’m concerned. And so why wouldn’t you just write a bunch of songs that have a dramatic arc that’s interesting, and just put it out there? Which is what lots of young artists are doing anyway; they release EPs or a crop of songs at a time, and I think that’s really cool. Other than that, I actually wouldn’t want to do it like this again—I wouldn’t want to sit with them so long. You get bored of the songs as well, and then you’ve got to go through the whole fucking process talking about them for another six months.

And then perform them forever, presumably.

Yeah, then performing them forever. But I’ve had a nice break actually since we finished in… Oh, my God, I don’t remember. We finished in March, so I haven’t listened to it since then. I wouldn’t want to have that protracted a process again though.

It sounds to me more like the process of writing a novel than recording an album—at least in terms of being in the weeds with every detail of it for so long.

Yeah, actually, funnily enough, I was thinking about that this week because the one thing I really did love about it was the solitary nature of it. I started a Substack a couple of weeks ago, and it means that when my baby was very young, in the evenings my partner would put her to bed and then I’d do the recording until midnight, and now in the evenings I prepare in advance for Substacks that are going to come out in a few weeks. And I love that concerted solitary writing time. I’m sure that’s something you can relate to also. So I’m glad. Maybe that’s a good thing for me.

I know that you completed your masters in psychoanalysis just before beginning the writing process. Did that feed into the final form of the album in any way?

I handed in my thesis maybe a month before I gave birth, and then I went to the graduation after she was born. It was actually a super painful process, because I only got GCSEs, so I went straight from GCSEs to a masters, and I’d never written like that at all. But it was good practice for me. And I should be careful what I say about it, but I did find psychoanalysis to be like a beautiful joke—it’s a ridiculous subject, and completely antiquated, and full of glaring, problematic errors. But it’s also an amazing extractive tool for making music, because it’s really about investigating the poetic nature of the unconscious—and that’s all it’s really good for, in my opinion. So its emphasis on reading between the lines I really enjoy, and I really enjoy that also in songwriting and poetry and novels, so I was thinking about it when I was writing.

Did it change how you watch a film or listen to an album or read a book? As in, did it alter your brain chemistry when it came to consuming culture, as well as making it?

Look, I am truly basic. I don’t mean that in a “pick me” kind of way, but I only watch three things: The Sopranos, Frasier, and Seinfeld. Oh, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But I watch them over and over and over again, and I think all of life’s great peaks and troughs can be found in those TV shows. So I’m a big TV person. I used to be a film person, but I just literally don’t have time these days. I do love reading though, and I especially love reading someone else’s film review without having seen the film. I have a friend who’s incredibly clever and I live for her telling me the plots of films that she’s seen and never seeing the film [myself]. I still get a lot out of it in that way, but not directly. I’m like a mosquito sucking the blood out of other people’s intelligence in that regard. [Laughs.] But it does feed into my songwriting.

Thinking about this idea of “patterns in repeat,” across the album there are lyrics that touch on your experiences of becoming a parent, and how that led you to thinking about your relationship with your own parents, and the traits that are passed on from generation to generation. But the intimacy of it and the ambient noises from your house that are threaded through also made me think about the daily patterns you repeat as a new parent, which are often sort of…

Banal?

I’m sure they’re often banal or mundane, but also very beautiful and profound in their own way, too? Were those patterns you were thinking about when making the record?

Yes, I was thinking about that. And I was also thinking about my parents, and parents in general. I’ve always had this desperate want to understand the internal workings of my parents’ desires and wants for life and what they actually wanted and whether it matched up to what they hoped. I love my parents and I have a very good relationship with them, but we lived in Reading and my dad commuted to London every day and back. And maybe that’s not what he hoped for, to sit on a train for an hour and a half every day each way. But I find the banality of the domestic sphere really interesting. I guess that’s a very psychoanalytical thing: trying to imagine all of these people who live under this one roof and all of their desires and wants and where their internal worlds are, and how they meet maybe once a day at a dinner table. That also becomes very apparent when your relationship changes after you have a baby. I found the change in relationship after having a baby amazing and really wonderful, by the way. But it’s very different, because you now both have your own internal worlds, and you’re sharing this thing that needs all of your attention. And so, again, you understand, Oh, my God, that’s what was going on in my household growing up! There were these two people who had their own desires, but who had very limited time to express that in any direction.

Tell me a little more about your decision not to tour the record in a more traditional sense. Was there anything specific that inspired you to do the parent-child shows?

I obviously have the great honor and privilege of knowing a lot of musicians, and when my daughter was really little, if anybody was in town in London, I’d message them and ask if I could come along with her and watch the soundcheck, and it was amazing. The first one we did was with Buck Meek from Big Thief for his solo show, and he had a record out that was the soundtrack to our first couple of days with her, so that was incredibly special. I just thought: I know people open up their soundcheck sometimes for paying customers, so why not do a matinee where parents and children can come? They’re going to be very relaxed and probably chaotic events, but I hope that more people do it, because I don’t really go out in the evenings anymore, but I’d still love to go to gigs.

It’s brilliant that you’re able to do it on your own terms like that. There’s so much pressure on musicians to promote records in a very prescribed way. Do you hope that it can provide an example for others as well?

I do, although there are some caveats to that. One is that I’ve been doing it for so long that I have enough financial stability to do it this way, which is a huge privilege, of course. But also, I don’t have a lot of ambition. If I wanted to be a bigger artist, I obviously would have to tour a lot more. But I don’t have a lot of ambition, so I guess I’m lucky in that way. [Laughs.] It’s kind of boring, but there’s a huge financial complexity to choosing not to tour, which is why I’ve started a Substack— but it’s great, I love it. Really, the privilege of having started so young has turned out to be that I’m able to dictate what I want to do now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Patterns in Repeat is due out on October 25.