FEATURE:
Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)
Laura Marling’s I Speak Because I Can at Fifteen
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IN a faultless career…
where she has not put a foot wrong or released an album that is not spectacular, it might seem relative to say her 2010 album, I Speak Because I Can, is not considered to be her peak work. It is still stronger than most other albums released that year. Consider the fact Laura Marling turned thirty-five last month. When I Speak Because I Can was released, she was barely twenty. Astonishing to have released an album as mature, assured and phenomenal! Following her stunning debut of 2008, Alas, I Cannot Swim, I think I Speak Because I Can is among her finest work. Marling’s latest album, 2024’s Patterns in Repeat, is a masterpiece. Possibly her best album yet. It is frightening how brilliant Marling is! Few artists could release eight near-perfect albums and we still think the best is ahead of them. As I Speak Because I Can turns fifteen on 22nd March, I want to spend some time with it. Reaching number four on the U.K. chart, this was a major success in a year that boasted some spectacular albums. I will end with some reviews for a stunningly beautiful and moving album. One where Laura Marling’s lyrical brilliance is near its peak. Some of the reviews for I Speak Because I Can mentioned her age. Marling was a teenager when she was recording the album. It is understandable that her musical palette and lyrical potential was not as realised and full-bodied as it was on future albums.
However, for such a young artist, releasing something as singular and stunning as I Speak Because I Can should not be understated. I will start out with this feature from The Guardian. Written by Laura Barton, they named Laura Marling’s second studio album the eighth-best release of 2010:
“Laura Marling's second album, released earlier this spring, was a breathtaking accomplishment. Though her debut, Alas I Cannot Swim, was a beguiling collection of songs that suggested a rich and distinctive talent, it offered little indication of the furious speed with which her songwriting would mature; I Speak Because I Can is the kind of album musicians spend a lifetime hoping to make.
There is something about Marling's songwriting that is crisp and unflinching, something almost painfully precise. In the album's title track, it's there in the needlepoint sharpness: "I speak because I can, to anyone I trust enough to listen/You speak because you can to anyone who'll hear what you say." But she counterbalances such moments with sudden twists of sentiment, lets the coolness of her voice grow rougher, rawer, and brings a kind of gusty, unleashed quality to lines such as: "Never rode my bike down to the sea, never quite figured out what I could believe, never got up and said anything worthy, for he, for my."
Stand-out tracks include the rollicking Ramblin' Man, the wistful, defiant Goodbye, England and the brief, bittersweet Blackberry Stone, the latter a quiet rumination on death and appreciating the simpler pleasures of life: "I'd be sad that I never held your hand as you were lowered," she sings in one of the album's most devastating lyrics. "But I'd understand that I would never let you go."
This year, Marling stands quite peerless among not only her own generation of songwriters, but also generations before her; a quite extraordinary feat”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. Very little is written about I Speak Because I Can. That is a real shame. It is an album worthy of more than it got! I want to drop in bits of interviews from 2010 with Laura Marling. I want to start out with the first of two interviews with The Guardian:
"I'm almost an entirely different person to the one I was when I wrote the first album," says Laura Marling, smoking prodigiously on the patio of a King's Cross pub. Then, the singer-songwriter was a pale-faced, chronically shy 17-year-old keen on grungy T-shirts, mulishly determined not to be gussied up for popular consumption. Her 2008 Mercury-nominated debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, saw her pushed, blinking, into the full-beam of acclaim. Marling was heralded as a precocious young talent, and her striking lyricism and graceful delivery gave rise to flattering Joni Mitchell comparisons.
The LP was produced by her then-boyfriend Charlie Fink, frontman of the folksy pop group Noah and the Whale, because her lack of confidence meant she couldn't express ideas to a stranger. It speaks volumes that Marling, who has just turned 20, chose to make her new record with Ethan Johns, producer also of the Kings of Leon and Rufus Wainwright. Titled I Speak Because I Can, the 10-song set has a fuller, more robust sound, and sees Marling tenderly trace the arcs of relationships with former lovers, as well as the importance of her Hampshire family roots and the jagged conflicts of womanhood and marriage. There's no breast-beating here, more an exquisite quality of guarded observation that lingers long after the record has finished.
In the flesh, she looks like she's been redrawn with a stronger outline. She has makeup on, for starters, and her hair colour has changed from white blond to a sombre brunette. The intonation of her voice is clear and deliberate but deeper than you'd expect from her crystalline singing. "I didn't want to wear makeup then," she explains, "because I didn't want to give in to that. It was all because I wasn't at ease with myself." But the darker barnet wasn't a premeditated image change, she insists, simply the result of covering up a DIY bleaching that turned her locks blue and crusty.
Marling admits to being an odd kid. The youngest of three sisters, she felt out of place at her Quaker school in Reading. She moved to London aged 16 and befriended "other weirdos who were just like me". This meant a cadre of young musicians including Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn who formed a nu-folk scene around a Chelsea pub, Bosun's Locker, where Marling found her home singing with Noah and the Whale before striking out on her own.
Although her reluctance to lead a nine-to-five existence pushed her towards an unconventional lifestyle, endearingly, Marling is very old-fashioned. She is a (her words) "wet blanket" who eschews drugs and clubbing in favour of dinner parties at home in Shepherd's Bush. She abhors our modern-day sexual sensationalism and the media's destructive obsession with kiss-and-tells and, to boot, is an incurable romantic who loves the heroines of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.
While her two albums evoke an empathy with the lovelorn and spiritually wounded, she doesn't perpetuate the wearisome persona of a musician who's suffered for their art. "I've been very fortunate. My parents bought me a guitar and my dad taught me. I went to a good school where I had a music scholarship and was able to learn music and not much else. I've had a pretty easy ride, I have to say."
If her songs have a tendency to bleakness, Marling says, it's because she's most productive when low. Lyrically, though, they have beguiling layers of subterfuge. "I definitely tell things at arm's length but that is conscious. No part of me wants everybody to know what's going on." Which must have made it all the harder when the wilting of her love affair with Fink was laid bare after Noah and the Whale's lump-in-your-throat break-up album The First Days of Spring came out last summer.
"I had a copy of the album, which was very nice of him to send me, but I just wasn't expecting it [the public dissection of their break-up]". Worse still was the leering, flippant tone that music scribes used to write about it. "When I opened up a magazine it was heartbreaking. I was an 18-year-old when it was written. It made me realise that journalists don't give a shit. Why would they?”
Before coming to a third interview, I have chosen some sections of another interview from The Guardian. Big fans of her music, it is not surprising there was a lot of fascination around Laura Marling. After releasing a Mercury Prize-nominated debut that blew people away, there were a lot of eyes on her in 2010:
“Laura Marling's set at Glastonbury this summer must have been the most serene festival performance of the year. Chatting wryly between song after spine-tinglingly perfect song, she was so composed and quietly assured that, at certain points, you could sense a collective swoon.
When I later walked past her outside some Portaloos, I found myself gauchely telling her she'd been wonderful. Now, as I meet her in her local, a small west London pub, I confess to this previous, brief encounter and watch her blue-green eyes widen in patient surprise. I'd interrupted her eating a bowl of noodles, I add, by way of an apology. "Oh how glamorous," she says dryly.
The truth is that the woman sitting in front of me – sipping black coffee, smoking, clad in a camel coat and exuding a ghostly sort of radiance – is nothing if not glamorous. Soignee to the point of actressy, maintaining eye contact with a coolly intense gaze, she is an entirely different being from the desperately shy teenager that put out Alas I Cannot Swim two years ago.
When she toured that album – a Mercury- nominated debut credited with spear- heading an indie-folk revival, and a bewilderingly precocious achievement considering she wrote it aged 16 – her stare would be resolutely fastened on a spot just in front of her feet. It was often painful to watch, as she readily admits.
So where has her newfound ease come from? Partly from growing up – she's 20 now – but also, "because I really considered the fact that if people have come to see a gig, it's actually part of my… role as an entertainer," she over-enunciates the words parodically, "to show my gratitude to them for being there and to stop making them feel like they're slightly intruding on something."
That sense of intrusion, or at least of acute intimacy, is very much there on her second album, I Speak Because I Can – a bolder and fuller record than the first. Though many of its songs are spun by adopted personae (the title track, for example, is written as Penelope, waiting for Odysseus to return) it has the power, like that searing wintry gaze of hers, to cut right to the core. There are few songwriters around at the moment who can match Marling for emotional intensity.
Unsurprisingly, writing songs ("a mixture of self-flagellation and therapy") comes easiest when she's unhappy. Which must present her with a bit of a paradox. Does it mean that she… "Goes looking for it?" she laughs, finishing the sentence. "It's the same reason I don't take drugs," she says. "Life is hard enough." Does she drink, though? "Oh yeah. Hell, yeah," she gives a low chuckle. "But I don't think you have to look very far to find something to make you feel a bit low. Maybe one day when I'm perfectly happy I won't write another song, but I don't think we're in any danger of that."
If not perfectly happy, she certainly seems extraordinarily comfortable in her skin. She admits "when I started doing this I spent too much time making sure that people didn't make me do things I didn't want to do." She was a contrary teenager, making what she terms "anti-points", the most obvious of which was not ever appearing in make-up – she'd doggedly wipe it all off before she went on stage or TV. "And that's all well and good until you travel loads and get off a plane looking like the back end of a bus." (At this point it's worth saying that she is indeed wearing mascara and a tiny bit of blusher, and very lovely she looks with it, too.)
There's a grander explanation for this concession to cosmetics, though: "Womanhood is something you don't consider until it hits you," she says. "At first I was intimidated by it and then I felt empowered by it." It also found her "going into a shop and picking up a baggy T-shirt in one hand and a dress in the other and going [she puts on a mock-existential-crisis voice] 'Who am I?'" Now, clad in an outfit that falls somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum, she adds: "I definitely know my place in the world a lot better, which makes everything a lot easier”.
I want to get to a couple of reviews for I Speak Because I Can. Before that, there is a great archived interview from the New York Times that caught my eye. American audiences possibly discovering Laura Marling then. Such an exciting and interesting young artist who was showing immense promise even back then. I discovered Marling on her debut album and have followed her since. Such a major talent who is one of our greatest songwriters ever:
“How old were you when you wrote the songs on “I Speak Because I Can”?
From 18 to 19. That year in anybody’s life is very much a transition. I began to feel like an adult for the first time. I think the responsibility of that, and of being a woman — those suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. My priorities changed a little bit, what I cared about and what I didn’t care about.
What things were you caring about and not caring about?
It has to do with what I do. I was so concerned about how I was being presented or projected, and how people would perceive my music because of that. In order to have that much control over yourself, you have to be a very difficult person to be around. Also I was very shy when I first started touring. I feel like I know my place in the world now.
What does that feel like?
You don’t have to charm. You are who you are and you know you’ll be that forever.
Do you write autobiographically or do you create fictional characters?
I think it’s a mix of both. I presume it’s the same when you write a novel. I tried to write some stories not too long ago, and they were so self-indulgent. I suppose that’s what every first novel is like, and yet it’s the thing you have to write. The majority of the songs are sort of semi-self-conscious autobiography, and putting yourself in a character just to make sure it’s at arm’s length.
“I Speak Because I Can,” the title song, is a kind of modern-day retelling of the tale of Penelope and Odysseus. What about their story did you connect with?
I happened to have read “The Odyssey” just before I started writing it. I found it so strange that a female character at the beginning of Western literature was portrayed as strong and independent. Then I read these letters that were reprinted in the newspaper between a chap and his woman during World War II. There were hints of sexuality — they took away all my naïveté about women throughout history.
There are folklorish elements in your songwriting as well.
We recorded the album in such an English place, in the middle of the countryside in the West Country. And it’s just beautiful, the last bit of mid-England that’s untouched. I’m fascinated by pagan history. Old English folk stories are absolutely brilliant. Some of them are so witty, and some are so dark. That’s what folk is, I guess. Maybe I stepped closer to actually calling myself folk.
Have you been reading anything good lately?
I just got into Philip Roth. I read “Everyman” and “The Human Stain” and I got halfway through “Portnoy’s Complaint” and thought, I’m really quite bored of him moaning. I’m reading Hesse’s “Siddhartha” at the moment.
What records did you listen to when you were a kid?
The records that were on in the car. We always had a Stevie Wonder record, we always had a Joni Mitchell record. Those were my childhood soundtracks. I’ll always be a closet Steely Dan fan. But the first album I bought was by Macy Gray”.
I am going to wrap up with a couple of reviews. The first I want to include is from the BBC. Similar to a lot of reviews, they praise her abilities and songwriting but say that her true talents will be revealed later. I think it is a little dismissive and unfair. I Speak Because I Can is a complete work that I cannot find fault with:
“When Laura Marling appeared on the folk scene in 2008, aged 17, there was almost as much anticipation of her promise as praise for the music she produced. This was no bad thing, allowing development as an artist, and crucially not placing too much pressure or expectation on not-as-yet broad shoulders. Her debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, was delivered to a generous critical reception, but the question asked this time round was always going to be one of progression, and the fulfilment of that abundant early talent.
Listening to Alas and second full-length, I Speak Because I Can, back-to-back, a change in tone – if not direction – is evident from opener and lead single Devil's Spoke. The production here is more deliberate and pored-over, expanding upon the earlier bare-bones approach. A leaf out of the Mumford & Sons school of orchestration has also been taken, with Rambling Man the greatest representation of this. The development in vocal styling is also stark; gone is the wispy, quick-fire phrasing and in walks deeper, slower, huskier proclamations. In many ways darkness has replaced the brightness.
It would, however, be disingenuous to paint this record as a collection of Marling's miserabilism. Despite the downbeat opening tracts, certain songs – Darkness Descends and I Speak Because I Can – abound with optimism and the ultimate, swelling crescendo of the latter displays an impressive mastery of dynamics. Similarly, at least a touch of variation is a necessity in folk, and this is demonstrated frequently, no more noticeably than when the boisterous acceleration of Alpha Shallows falls under a weight of heavy strums and gives way to the subtle, tender love letter to a country that is Goodbye England (Covered In Snow).
There was a justifiable argument to be made that Marling's real talent had to be seen live; the recorded compositions not revealing the entire picture. With I Speak Because I Can, that argument may now end. Though just 20, it doesn't appear within her scope to make an outright bad album, and here we are shown a few more glimpses of her gift, but yet not an overwhelming outpouring of it. It's clear that there has been a progression as a songwriter, with a previously unfound depth apparent on these ten tracks. Though it undoubtedly draws on the travails of the past two-or-so years, there remains, without a doubt, more in the can from young Laura”.
I am ending with a positive review from Pitchfork. With U.S. sources and media maybe fresh to Marling at this point, she did get some commercial success there. The album reached number seven on the Folk Albums chart:
“Reviewing Laura Marling's Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, in 2008, I worried that the then-18-year-old might too quickly shed the teenage guilelessness that contributed so greatly to the record's appeal. Marling possessed an undeniable knack for writing about young love with directness and authentic feeling, but at times her pseudo-profound poetics suggested the young folkie was in too much of a hurry to be a serious adult.
Clearly, I significantly underestimated Laura Marling's capabilities. Her sophomore effort, I Speak Because I Can, finds Marling, still only 20, shrugging off virtually all traces of girlishness and wide-eyed charm, instead delving into darkly elemental, frequently morbid folk. And yet, astonishingly, the expected growing pains never come. To say Marling evinces wisdom beyond her years on I Speak would be a criminal understatement, considering she's created a haunting, fully flowered gem of an album despite being younger than two-thirds of the Jonas Brothers.
These are folk-rock songs, but Marling doesn't lazily trade on it like so many other would-be old souls. Instead, like Fairport Convention or Nick Cave or Cat Power, she uses folk as an archetypal form to get at the essential realities of love, sex, heartbreak, and death. Sometimes she does it with heart-stopping quietness, her voice dropping to conversational tones on "Made by Maid" and "What He Wrote". Just as often, Marling sets her allegories to raucous musical accompaniment, an especially impressive feat considering the calm of her debut. The bluesy jig of opener and first single "Devil's Spoke" might elicit a few less-than-ideal comparisons with KT Tunstall, but Marling blows that kind of politely insistent stuff out of the water on the soaring, thunderous "Rambling Man" and the gypsy-ish breakdown of "Alpha Shallows" (which makes up for that song's momentary slip into sub-Dylan poetic doggerel).
It would have been all too easy for an album like this, so grimly fixated and coming from someone of such tender age, to be written off as the work of a morose young Romantic. However, Marling seems to have a great deal of self-awareness of her melancholic bent, lightly skewering herself on "Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)" for writing an "epic letter" to an estranged lover that's "22 pages front and back/ But it's too good to be used." And yet, she's not playing dress-up. She's a wholly developed artist in full command of gifts that may not yet be finished arriving”.
On 22nd March, it will be fifteen years since Laura Marling’s I Speak Because I Can was released. Maybe a fifteenth anniversary is not as special as the twentieth or even the tenth, though I feel this wonderful album deserves some love. Still recording music of the highest order, I can see Marling releasing albums for decades more! Someone who has this golden run of albums that have all been acclaimed, there are few artists that can boast that kind of consistency. Not just one of our very best songwriters. Laura Marling is surely one of…
THE greatest who has ever lived.