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A few years ago, Laura Marling was studying for a masters in psychoanalysis when she was introduced to the concept of Family Constellations — a therapeutic approach in which individuals come to understand themselves in the context of their family dynamic. For Marling, it had proved intriguing; a way to explore all of the stories, scripts and dynamics that we carry with us through our lives; their lingering influence, their governing principles.
In early 2023, when she became a mother, she thought of it again. This time, however, Marling had a new perspective, a realisation that with the birth of her daughter she had become “a different part of the constellation” — shuffling up the generational branches and rearranging the sequence. There was a reassessment, a new understanding of her parents, an acknowledgement that we are all moving along the same inexorable path.
Her eighth album, Patterns in Repeat, considers all of these matters, making an exploration of mortality as much as motherhood, in which songs from before meet songs from after, old tunes, lullabies, instrumentals, and even a track written by her own father. But all are infused with a startling intimacy; a sonic representation of a new kind of closeness.
In the beginning, Marling was euphoric. There was a kind of mania to her early days of motherhood. “I was high as fuck actually,” she says. “I was sending voice notes like a madman.” She wrote one song in that time — album opener Child of Mine, but otherwise knew well enough to let her new life settle. “You do have to wait until parenthood has seeped into all the edges, spread out a bit over your being, before you write about it,” she says.
Instead she spent those first weeks listening to others’ music — largely to Leonard Bernstein’s soundtrack to West Side Story, which she found herself playing on repeat. “I kept listening to it and bawling my eyes out because I wanted her to hear it,” she says. “And because West Side Story has the biggest emotions captured in this incredible musical score, so maybe it was also a catharsis helping me to cope with what felt like the massive, uncontainable emotion that I was feeling.”
What she felt, then, was a kind of miraculousness — of meeting her partner, of her pregnancy, of her daughter’s birth. But also a new and intense awareness of life’s fragility — “there was something about loss which just became incredibly profound all of a sudden.”
She thought about romantic loss, death in childbirth, the fact that one day her parents will no longer be here. And about other endings, too. “[Parenthood] does close a chapter on your romantic life,” she says. “Not that it ends romance between you and your partner, but it is the definitive end of longing in a way. Certainly romantic longing. And I think there was something to do with mourning that end, and anticipating my daughter’s own journey in that way.”
There is plenty of contemplation of what it means to be someone’s daughter on Patterns in Repeat. The quiet tenderness of Your Girl followed the death of one of her father’s best friends, who had four daughters. “We were all very close, and he was such a character, he was a real vagabond, he was just brilliant and smart and funny and wonderful. Very missed,” she says. “But his daughters all had babies after he died — his four daughters have now got seven children between them. And you just think oh my god, he would have loved that so much. And it of course makes you think about your own parents.”
It was Marling’s own father who encouraged her musical curiosity as a child, and on this record she returns that kindness by recording her interpretation of Looking Back, a song he wrote close to 50 years ago. Then in his 20s, it takes the perspective of an old man looking back over his life. “It’s always surprising to hear longing [in a parent],” she says. “But I’m always trying to get my parents to give me their internal worlds — I want truth more than anything, a kind of forthrightness. I want to know that they had desires, things that drove them through their life, things that made the decisions for them.”
The album’s title also focuses on the delicate calibration of the parent-child relationship. At the funeral of her partner’s aunt last year, Marling found herself in conversation with her daughters. “There was a lot of discussion about how you were raised, and how you raise your own children,” she says. “And the way that she raised her children was very much ‘take them to the nightclub’. And they loved it, they had an incredibly vivid childhood. But it was full of the horrors of freedom, unstable, changing all the time. And there’s a kind of beauty and poetry to that life, but funnily enough they’ve all decided that they want stability for their families at any length that they can get it.”
‘Patterns in Repeat’ references that chain of events. “The way the main event just becomes a diluted ripple that eventually changes form down the line,” she says. “It has this never-ending consequence. So it just feels like a huge responsibility to get it right.”
There are no drums on this record. Instead, the lyrics lie low and the songs have a softness, buffeted by strings that nod to Bernstein’s score. Its hushed nature is in part due to the process of its recording — the songs set down in Marling’s home when her daughter was still quite new. The singer moving her studio up from the basement, playing guitar and recording takes while the baby sat in her bouncer, or in a sling, or was content to be lying on her stomach, rolling around on the floor.
There were challenges, of course. “I was having to sing close to the microphone, there’s accidental recordings [of her daughter] in there and the dog shakes his collar at one point,” she says. “And that was at the time when she was doing innumerable naps a day, so I was running up and down the stairs all day. But I’d get half an hour at a time when she was sleeping, and if she was awake I’d be recording it very quickly. But it was just the satisfaction of getting stuff done while you’re doing everything with one hand. I really thrived off that.”
She sent these home recordings to Rob Moose, who supplied the string arrangements, and then later to producer Dom Monks for general finessing and overdubs. Monks argued to re-record the tracks properly in his studio, “because sonically it would have been a lot better.” But Marling stood firm. “I guess it’s actually one of the first times in my life where I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” she says. “And most of it was to do with not fucking around and just getting it done quickly. Because I didn’t want to try and structure something complicated around something that for me had to be simple. So I was a bit like ‘I hear you, I love you, I trust your opinion, but not this time.’ That was just how it had to be.”
Before she was pregnant, Marling was having dinner with the film director Darius Marder. Marder, who had children young, asked the singer whether she had any plans to be a parent. Marling hesitated. “I don’t know if I can cope with motherhood taking away artistry,” she told him. Marder objected. “‘That’s a completely ridiculous thing to say’,” he told her. “He said: ‘Each of them can’t live without the other, and you’ll open up a whole new world to yourself. And you’ll never have known it if you didn’t do it. And I felt really silly for saying it. I was like actually, that is a really trivial thing to worry about.” A month later, she was pregnant.
That famed conflict between motherhood and creativity has not yet proved so great. And if it exists at all, it stands as a willing tension. Partway through Patterns in Repeat’s title track comes a familiar refrain, a small flickering call-back to Marling’s 2013 album, Once I Was an Eagle. “I want you to know that I gave it up willingly,” she sings this time. “Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me.”
Eagle was a record she wrote “at the pinnacle of my freedom in my mid-20s. When I didn’t have any sense of consequence, I still had a very good grip on naivety,” she says. “And I now look at that time incredibly fondly because that’s never coming again”. To make this musical reference felt like “a message for my daughter, or a message for myself, even: the idea that it wasn’t taken away from me, artistry or music. I walked into it knowing what the potential consequences were. And it hasn’t turned out to be as I thought it might be.”
The feeling of motherhood has in fact completely surprised her. “It’s the huge sense that you would do anything to protect them. And the feeling that I want to all the cliched things — I want to live in the country, I want to get some pigs, and homeschool her,” she says. “I do want to do music, but I definitely, absolutely don’t want to go on tour again. I just didn’t realise I had this incredible, massive gift for care.”
