Interview This woman’s work: Laura Marling

Borrowed from the ancient poet Virgil (obvs), ‘Semper Femina’ is an expression pinched from a longer line of Latin poetry, which roughly translates to “woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing.” The initial decision to chop it in half was, at first, one of sheer practicality; “the full phrase didn’t fit on my leg,” she shrugs with a laugh. Today, she’s well aware of the irony found in immortalising a sentence concerned with constant change in permanent form, by way of tattoo gun. “It still just proves the stubbornness of women,” she hoots. Inadvertently, she flipped the meaning on its head with her edits, too. ‘Semper Femina’. Always a woman.

Laura had always set out to write a record about women, she says, but beginning to put pen to paper, found herself automatically adopting a male voice. “The reason why I started writing it as a man was symptomatic of my own immaturity, or my own shame, about what’s sort of the acceptable societal boundary or way to appreciate women,” she admits. “That’s a really hodge-podge way of saying it,” she adds as an aside. “Then, when I stepped over that boundary – which seemed like a big fearful step to me at the time – stepping over it was like, this is totally ridiculous. There is no boundary, there is no taboo. It was all very simple, but quite liberating.”

Announced with a latex-clad video for ‘Soothing’ – a creeping, mildly sinister album opener which deals in desire and voyeurism – news of ‘Semper Femina’ came along with a press release full with coded queer language. The album was written during a ‘masculine time in her life,’ it reads. These gender-bending suggestions are wholly intentional ones, she agrees, but as you’d perhaps expect from her track record as a lyricist, this isn’t an autobiographical album dealing in any kind of sexual exploration. Cloaked in ambiguity, each lyric viewed through mirrors, it’s a narrative that escapes definition. Depending on how it’s looked at, and by who, ‘Semper Femina’ means entirely different things. In ‘Wild Fire’, she even attempts to skim-read someone else’s version of events, just so she can get to the bits that resonate personally. “Of course the only part that I want to read, is about her time spent with me,” she sings.

“I think it certainly was intentional,” she concurs, “in the sense that I didn’t want there to be an explicit nature to it in any way, because the relationship between women, on the entirety of the spectrum, is incredibly fluid and ambiguous, and I feel like that’s something unique to women.”

Being looked at is a topic that crops up again and again, notably in ‘Nouel’’s comparison of an unknown female muse to ‘L’origine du Monde’ (an ever-so-slightly NSFW French oil painting, viewed by thousands of people every day at the Musée d’Orsay). “The way I came across that painting was in a book called ‘When Women Were Birds,’ which was written by a Mormon...” she pauses, taking stock of her garbled pronunciation, “it’s like halfway between moomin and Mormon,” she coughs, before composing herself. “She was talking about how magnificent it is that we associate the origin of the world with the female capacity for gestation and creativity. I had that association with it, and ‘Nouel’ to me is all about this push and pull between a completely liberated creative, and being unnaturally incarcerated by her own fear because she’s so frail in a way, in a physical sense. That painting seemed to fit really well into that, because it’s a really vulnerable painting. It’s showing the universe, in a weird way.”

Then, there’s the strange rank of observers flanking the matching visual for ‘Soothing’. “Every decent art student has read that John Berger book,” Laura states, tossing ‘Ways of Seeing’ into conversation without hesitation. “That particular voyeuristic nature of that image is the specified taboo nature surrounding feminine relationships; whether they’re sexual or not,” she says. “That ambiguity is important. I felt, I began to think about, how restrictive that is in our societal structure, and how that keeps women apart.”

After nine years of being watched, Laura Marling has made a record which seems to turn the camera back on its audience, while also taking a good long, hard look at the ways in which we view ourselves, and women, too. ‘Semper Femina’ might have a title that suggests definition, but it’s Laura Marling’s most evasive, compelling, and experimental record yet.

Laura Marling's sixth album 'Semper Femina' is out on 10th March via More Alarming Records.

Taken from the March 2017 issue of DIY, out now. Subscribe below.

Tags: Laura Marling, From The Magazine, Features, Interviews