2020 Hyundai Mercury Prize A brief look into… Laura Marling’s ‘Song for Our Daughter’

Seven albums in and imbued with a strain of often world-weary wisdom normally reserved for those edging closer to retirement, it’s hard to wrangle with the idea that Laura Marling has only just turned 30. Decorated and acclaimed, with her latest marking her fourth time shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, it’s not just that the London singer has already spent 12 years in the spotlight, but that an album such as ‘Song for Our Daughter’ seems to come from a place of reflection and gravitas that’s at stark odds with the modern world of instant gratification and transient pleasures.

Marling’s an old soul, and her most recent work – inspired by Maya Angelou’s Letter to my Daughter and written to an imaginary child of her own (not that she didn’t field a fair amount of interview questions asking after an actual supposed new offspring…) - taps into some of her most starkly intimate moments yet. Stripped back and allowing the singer’s affective, throaty-yet-clear vocal to take centre stage, these are songs that begin at deeply personal starting points but end up universal; even opener ‘Alexandra’, a response to Leonard Cohen’s 2001 track ‘Alexandra Leaving’, manages to turn its specific subject matter into a wider musing on love and art (“What kind of woman gets to love you?”).

In turn pained (‘Blow by Blow’), stoic (‘Hope We Meet Again’), meditative (‘Only The Strong’) and heartbreaking (‘Fortune”s opening lines are based on Marling’s own mother, who kept a fund in case she ever needed to run away), in lesser hands ‘Song for Our Daughter’ could easily end up as a heavy listen. Yet, though many of these tracks are more than capable of bringing out the goosebumps, they’re helmed deftly by a narrator who knows when to deploy a well-timed swear or change in pace (‘Strange Girl’ sits as a rolling, road trip mood-lifter) to keep the crowd on side.

Smart, sensitive but eternally likeable, Marling’s strength has always been her ability to be both poetic and grounded - someone who spends half her time with her nose in a book, and the other half with a cigarette in her hand. On ‘Song for Our Daughter’, this intimate warmth is unmistakeable. A listen to this and the next generation should be in good hands.