Connection, context and rewriting your own narrative is the crux of Laura Marling’s fifth album, ‘Short Movie’. While travelling around the East Coast of America and touring fairly anonymously “on my tod”, she befriended an old hippy in Mount Shasta, where “a lot of hippies moved in the 60s, because they believed that an alien spacecraft lived at the top of a mountain. It’s on Wikipedia.” Her new acquaintance apparently bookended almost every far-fetched tale with “it’s a short fucking movie, man.” It became, explains Laura, “the over-riding sentiment of what was driving me to do what I was doing,” and it tellingly became the bookend of her own record, too.

“I just got really into the idea that the life we live, as contemporary humans, is constructed,” she expands. “We build our reality, and give ourselves a story. We tell ourselves who we are in context to where we’re born, or what we do. I took myself out of that, and gave myself a new context. Human life is so short, and silly, and insignificant, in an enormous and incomprehensibly expansive universe. I still feel really strongly that I can get really dark, and at that time,” she says, referring to the last two years, “I was really dark. But I need to believe that there is fantasy; a surrealness to life beyond our control… a creative force in the universe.”

Since returning to England, Laura’s been reading lots of occultist literature, she says, brandishing an arm to wave roughly in the direction of Gurdjieff’s Collected Works; a ridiculously proportioned book the size of a very square-looking cat. It’s currently acting as a doorstop. ‘Gurdjieff’s Daughter’ - a song where she recites mantras like “don’t be impressed by strong personalities” and “never give orders just to be obeyed” - is inspired by the writing of Chilean spiritual guru and avant-garde film-maker, Alejandro Jodorowsky. She tosses this into conversation lightly, as if referring to her personal recipe for guacamole. “He was tracked down by [the mystic,] Gurdjieff’s daughter. She shoved him into a taxi after the premiere of one of his films, took him off to a hotel room, and…” she hesitates, attempting to form the right words, “did some… acts, upon him,” she coughs. “It’s really weird stuff that they were doing, and she was proving her capacity for sexual - and therefore, creative - power,” she goes on. “She said, I’ve tracked you down because you have to learn these moral values and put it into your art form, get it into the world.”

Flitting between tiny American towns, in a car stacked up with old records from 1969 (“I just noticed I was buying a lot of records from that year,” she shrugs) and textbooks by mystics, Laura had a sort of existential revelation, and eventually she returned to writing with a new outlook. She allowed herself to “fall in love” with a 1959 Gibson 335 electric guitar, and in doing so, had to adapt to a totally new way of playing. “Shaking it up a bit, and rolling the dice again,” opened her eyes to music again; she stopped feeling weary and contractually obliged to write. “I’ve got the joy back,” she smiles.

“I think my reality bounds got taken down to an extent where I felt like I wasn’t constricted to anything,” she adds. “I don’t think I took a particularly wide step out of what I was doing before, but I made the beginnings of a step. I hope to expand on that.”

“Complete insignificance is really liberating,” she nods emphatically. Laura says she takes herself less seriously these days, and she openly admits that in the past being a musician felt a little too ego-driven. “[The last two years] took away my own self-importance, and lightened me up a bit, made me a bit more playful,” she says, “‘Short Movie’ is less Romantic. The pursuit of Romanticism didn’t appeal to me anymore, and I mean in a poetic sense. I wasn’t trying to make gods of men anymore, or poetry of situations. I was just observing.” She pauses. “It’s allowed me to take myself less seriously. But,” she adds as a disclaimer, ”not to the extent that I’m a complete goof.”

It’s safe to say that Laura Marling is in no danger of being a goof. Between albums she applied for a poetry course in upstate New York, under a pseudonym, and was flat-out refused admission. “I thought it’d be the perfect thing to distract me from actually having to sit still. I worked really hard for it, but I didn’t get in.” She shrugs, and throws her lighter up in a somersault. “It was a challenge to myself, to see if I could be vulnerable in a different way. And I was vulnerable,” she concludes.

For the first time Laura took up a seat in the production chair for ‘Short Movie,’ a transition which she openly admits was daunting, too, “because I didn’t want to waste people’s time, I didn’t want to dither.” ‘Safe As Milk’ by Captain Beefheart, she says, is a huge influence on this record. “They went mental with panning - they have a kick drum up here, and snare drum down there,” she enthuses, picking random points in the air. “When you listen it’s like he’s in the middle of your brain. It’s really disorientating and brilliant. We were playing with panning a lot on this.”

“[Producing] really took away the mystery, in a good way,” she adds. “Who’s the guy with the beard?” she asks, moving towards the window for yet another smoke. “Rick Rubin. He’s the ultimate mystery.” It helped her to get right underneath the song’s skin, then? “Yeaaah,” she says slowly, turning the question over. “Under the song’s skin. I was like, ‘oh, you don’t know anything’, Again, proving to myself that I don’t know anything.”

Laura has a reputation for being fiercely guarded about her personal life, both in interviews, and as a songwriter. Today, though, not so much. On her last album, ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ she transformed herself into a bird of prey, a master hunter, and the water spirit Undine. ‘I Speak Because I Can’ - a song she released aged 18 - was delivered through the voice box of an aging, “poor and lonely wife.” It would be wildly exaggerating to call ‘Short Movie’ - or indeed Laura Marling - a totally open book, but the arm with which she holds back her audience has grown shorter. “Definitely,” she laughs, “yeah.”

‘False Hope’ she explains, is her most patently autobiographical song, a panning camera following three days that she spent trapped in a New York Air BnB during Hurricane Sandy. “Is it still ok, that I don’t know how to be alone?” she asks, and it soon transforms into “is it still ok that I don’t know how to be, at all?” She’s fearful, upfront, and unmuddied by complex imagery. On ‘Short Movie’ Laura Marling doesn’t speak because she can, she speaks because she needs to know that she’s not alone.

“I was with a boyfriend who I’d only just met, and we were stuck in this tight, dark apartment,” she says. “At the end of the street there was a Trader Joe’s [grocery store], and there was a queue round the block to get in, and there were only candles. There was this woman,” she says, “who was downstairs, and not with it at all, and she came and knocked on our door. She was just terrified. We checked on her a lot. I didn’t like the idea of someone living in this horr..” she stops herself suddenly. “Harsh, not horrible. Not being looked after. It had such an effect on me, those three days. They did what they did in the movies, they fucking cut off the bridges!” she exclaims. “We had to get on this dodgy mini-van that was leaving to the airport. I think we went to Canada, because… oh, he’s Canadian! Escape to Canada.” She laughs to herself. If her old friend from Mount Shasta was here, he’d undoubtedly be shaking his head, and adding “it’s a short fucking movie, man.”

“I think I could get away with saying only half what I say, no?” asks Laura on the title track, over grating strings, gathering motion, eventually deciding “I don’t mind”. Her convoluted journey to this record took her from Hollywood and the Flintstones landscape of Joshua Tree, to mountain carparks for UFOs and finally, back to London. Along the way “I lost my shame about being afraid, or being lonely, or being weird,” she says. “It’s probably the most important thing that I’ve learnt so far.” For the first time, Laura Marling seems to have written an album that she hopes liberates other people as well as herself. “I hope that, should anyone have experienced anything similar to what I’ve experienced, that they feel comforted by it, or liberated by it, and unashamed of anything to do with the darker sides of being human.”

“Right,” says Laura, rising from the sofa and making for the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Crisps and hummus?”