Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
Laura Marling is quite the prodigal child, although not a child, but so youthful for a person with such amazing music writing ability. Her first album, Alas I Can Not Swim, was released in 2008 (the same year she won the Mercury Music Prize), where she became a fairly staple name on the indie/folk music scene.
Laura Marling is quite the prodigal child, although not a child, but so youthful for a person with such amazing music writing ability. Her first album, Alas I Can Not Swim, was released in 2008 (the same year she won the Mercury Music Prize), where she became a fairly staple name on the indie/folk music scene.
After an extensive period of touring, Marling decided to take three months off. She travelled a little, through England and Scotland, and spent a good deal of time in London coffee-shops doing crosswords, but it was not so very long until she began to write the songs that would form this album. “And then suddenly they all came at once,” she recalls, “within a period of about two months.”
Her third album, A Creature I Don’t Know is due for release in the next couple of days. It’s a prime example of Laura’s ability to create lyrics and showcases her brilliant voice perfectly. It’s not the most uplifting of albums with Sophia, the album’s first single, and All My Rage, which she describes as “a bit of fun … about taking it all on the chin.”, being the most uplifting (musically) of the tracks.
It’s noticeable that most of the songs have themes surrounding the idea of womanhood. With ideas drawn from life experience, books she’s read (eg. a biography of John Steinbeck, Robertson Davies’s Rebel Angels) and elements of “make believe”: “Someone told me a good writing tip is to write conversations with people you can’t have conversations with — that it’s quite useful for developing characters. I did that a lot while I was writing this album. There’s kind of a lot of one-sided conversations in it.”
Interestingly, all 10 tracks are played in the same tuning. Accounting to Marling herself: “The reason was probably as simple as because I was bored of the other tuning, and it’s always nice to feel as if you don’t know your instrument again… It’s DGDGBD – but the B string, if you make it B flat then it’s minor and if you make it A then it’s a seventh. It’s quite a hard tuning.” A Creature I Don’t Know also showcases experimentation with finding different techniques for her own voice. “Sometimes there’s certain angles where I can position my head and get this different sound, and I do find it quite interesting,” she says. “There’s definitely a few wobbles in my vocals, and there’s a proper R’n’B vibrato bit in one of the songs.
A Creature I Don’t Know is to be released on September 9 through EMI.
She’s also playing some shows around the UK and in North America.
Check out her website for more details.
Sally
