Laura Marling, synchronicity, and embracing the numinous

Close reading some Laura Marling songs because she's a poet and I LOVE HER

This week Laura Marling released ‘Patterns’, the first single from her eighth album, Patterns in Repeat, which comes out in October. I had other plans for this newsletter but instead I have listened to ‘Patterns’ maybe twenty times – I wish this was an exaggeration – and during this period of obsessive listening I’ve felt what I often feel listening to her music: transported out of time, into a sonic space that seems to have been constructed exactly for me, reflecting my life at this precise moment. I frequently find it to be both a revelatory and a creative experience, in which I gain a new perspective on something I’m already thinking about. This sounds maybe narcissistic, but it’s something Marling is aware of with regards to her own listeners, saying in an interview in 2020:

I think they listen to my music to get further into themselves.

It’s the closing verse to ‘Patterns’ that has hooked me:

pulled for meaning, I arched my back / and then from the black, you were born / forward leaning at first, abstract / you soon contract into form

The language is simple but the imagery is complex, a balance of physical shapes and metaphorical familial structures. To me, it invokes the moment during birth when not only the baby but also the mother is born. This is something I’ve been writing about in various guises for the last year - the sudden emergence of a raw, physical newness of self, archetypal and ancient, formless yet assured. Here I see the speaker claiming both the role of the mother and the child, narrating her own birth, the birth of her daughter, the birth of herself as a mother, and a reflection of this experience from many years down the line as the verse continues,

and now the time leaps by and starts to fly / and only then can I see / that we’re patterns in repeat

I’d been excited about the prospect of new Laura Marling music because, selfishly, I hoped it would offer me something specific about the experience of new motherhood (which it already has!). I was even more excited, then, to find she has recently started a Substack, and through her ‘Tarot of Songwriting’ posts she explicitly engages with the numinous, mystical element of her creative practice, reflecting on the power of (song)writing to foreshadow, instruct, and even offer the tools to divine certain aspects of one’s life.

Her seventh album Song for Our Daughter was released in April 2020, nearly three years before the birth of her actual daughter: it became a retrospective act of premonition. Further, in this post, she explains that not long after first laying eyes on her now-partner, it became clear she had been drawing him for months prior, as a character in a comic strip. When my daughter was born in September 2022, six months before Marling’s, I felt the album (which at that point had been a companion of mine for the previous two years) transform into a kind of affirmation, premonition, or manifestation. How strange for her to have sung into being the next chapter of her life. How odd to feel its correspondence in my own.

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When I first listened to Song for Our Daughter I was struck by its continuing preoccupation with the written word and its function. Throughout the album, lyrics are full of letters, notes, books, which are variously read and not read, sent and not sent. For example, ‘Held Down’ opens with the speaker realising their lover has left:

I woke up, it was four in the morning / clear as all hell that you’d already gone / your note said, “Dear, you know I hate to disappear / but the days are short and the nights are getting long”

Here the note is linguistically direct, and its sentiment clear. However, in ‘Only the Strong’ the speaker wishes they could

go back and find / letters I wrote you in my mind / perhaps I could unknot us from this awful bind

indicating there might be knowledge with revelatory potential trapped in the unwritten letter. In ‘Song for Our Daughter’ the questioning refrain of

do you remember what I said / the book I left by your bed / the words that some survivor read

discloses an anxiety over what damage might be wrought on the integrity of the spoken word as it subjected to our fallible memories, but also a further anxiety over whether the written word in this book will find and serve the right reader in time. Earlier in the album, the speaker in ‘Held Down’ admits that neither she nor her lover are thorough readers:

you sent me a book which you gave half a look / but I just don’t care for, and I cannot get through

Throughout these songs there is often pressure to respond and correspond, a lingering sense of missed opportunity rooted in some epistolary failure. In ‘Hope We Meet Again’ the speaker acknowledges that she

kept your letter, I read your words

but she has not replied and is conscious of this failing, expressed through the meta-reflexive line

I should write to him tomorrow, I wrote that yesterday.

The redundancy of the written word here emphasises the artifice of the promises we make to each other and ourselves. ‘For You’ closes the album, and perhaps offers some resolution to this pervading anxiety. In the song’s chorus the speakers attempts to express the depth of her love for her partner:

I thank a God I’ve never met / never loved, never wanted / for you, for you / I write it so I don’t forget / never let it get away / I wear a picture of you just to keep you safe

She calls on prayer and religious devotion to offer an architecture for her feeling, despite not having religious faith. She believes in talismans, wearing an image as a protective token, and writes this all down in an effort to preserve it – yet by the end of the song, in the final chorus this lyric has changed to

I sing it so I won’t forget / never let it get away

Finally, then, the power of her song is enough.

This emphasis on letters, books and the written word is not new to Marling’s music – I’ve a whole essay I could write tracing how this theme functions across her entire discography. For example, some instances of things not being written/read:

wrote an epic letter to you / and it’s twenty-two pages front and back / but it’s too good to be used from ‘Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)’

never finished that letter I was writing / never got up and said anything / worthy from ‘I Speak Because I Can’

wrote you a book but I left it out in the rain / left it there to dry but it got rained on once again from ‘Breathe’

she’s gonna write a book someday / of course the only part I want to read / is about her time spent with me from ‘Wild Fire’

But that’s for another day.

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I was drafting this post yesterday afternoon during my baby’s nap, but she woke up earlier than expected and I had to stop writing. We went out for the afternoon to the park, and played in the sun. We came home and I made her some tea. Then I saw that there was a new Tarot of Songwriting post, which included at the end an early recording of ‘Patterns’ – an acoustic, voice-noted version with slightly different lyrics. The final verse is recorded in this version as:

you pull for meaning that seems abstract / but will contract into form / forward leaning you’ll break from them / towards Bethlehem to be born

whereas the lyrics on the single are:

pulled for meaning, I arched my back / and then from the black, you were born / forward leaning at first, abstract / you soon contract into form

To me this difference is fascinating. In the first line, the subject and person transfers, so that the ‘you’ is no longer ‘pulling for meaning’ actively, but is now an ‘I’ being pulled. The inclusion of the physical detail of the arched back in a labouring body grounds us fully in the embodied moment, and also generates a sense of energetic potential, offering a foil for the ‘forward-leaning’ motion of the later line. There is a new separation of ‘abstract’ from ‘meaning’, and ‘abstract’ instead describes this physical ‘forward-leaning’ ‘you’, who then actively ‘contract[s] into form’ themselves, again placing emphasis on the embodiment of this. Form is now working on a physical as well as metaphorical level here. And the act of birth has now been placed centrally in the verse, rather than ending on the promise of it (and abandoning a fairly heavy line from Yeats). It was such a lovely incidental treat, after having already spent most of the day thinking about these lyrics, to get some fresh insight into the development of the song and how it came into being.

I’ve now been a fan of hers for fifteen years (I came to her a bit late, in 2011). In an interview in the Guardian yesterday, Marling reflected that as a young songwriter,

you start out as a conduit for God – not literally, I’m not a religious fanatic – but [in the sense that] your frontal lobe hasn’t shut. There are things floating in the air and some people have an antenna for them […] As you get older, you gain all these experiences that give this profound meaning to life, so a different kind of artistry comes through.

It seems significant to me that she has now started a longform writing platform with her Substack, offering the opportunity to share her words unadorned by music (a ‘different kind of artistry’). In her introductory post she encourages us to lean into the ‘mystical’ aspect of (song)writing, to use it as

a means to understand the patterns that rattle ever outward from some unknowable depth at the core of our being

I am trying to embrace this approach and lean into the synchronicities of things, accepting the offerings as they arrive.

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Recommendations (apart from, obviously, ‘Patterns’):

• This Blind Date column from the Guardian last week because it is just so, so joyful to read when it goes well

• I am about halfway through ‘Rural Hours’ by Harriet Baker, a group biography of the writers Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann which focuses on the quiet, domestic periods of their lives when they each respectively retreated to the countryside. Baker published an article in the Financial Times yesterday which introduces some of the key ideas of the book, exploring the creative potential within small domestic acts like list-making. It’s beautiful, lyrical writing which disguises how archivally dense the research is; I’m finding the book to be as soothing as it is informative.

• ‘Finish Your Projects’ - a Substack essay on academic & writerly self-sabotage by R Meager which hit a little too close to home!! In a good way. But also. Not.

If you have actually read all of this thanks I love you! xxx