As all four of my loyal readers will recall, in our last time together we talked Mumford & Sons. But to discuss their lovely music and lyrical depth in a vacuum does a disservice to the rest of the circle of musicians dubbed by the media as the “West London folk scene.” It neglects one particularly talented and fascinating up-and-comer — 21-year-old Laura Marling of Hampshire, England.
With three acclaimed albums under her belt, the first of which she released when she was 17, Marling is nothing if not impressive. She’s played increasingly bigger Glastonbury stages four years running. Jack White produced her blues covers of Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.” Her first two albums, “Alas I Cannot Swim” and the equally superb “I Speak Because I Can,” were both nominated for the Mercury Prize.
This year she pocketed the Brit Award for best female solo artist (Britain’s Grammy equivalent), beating out Ellie Goulding and Cheryl Cole to join the ranks of past winners Amy Winehouse and Adele. She also edged out Kanye West and took home the title of Best Solo Artist at the 2011 NME Awards, put on by popular UK music magazine NME.
But Marling doesn’t really see the point of the hallowed hardware. She told USA Today that “the best part of winning those awards is that my mum loves them, but that’s the extent of their relevance to me.”
In fact, she and her intricate folk are a world away from the glitzy pop artists who usually take home such awards.
Despite her young age — she wryly pointed out that she’s legal in the States now as she sipped a beer on stage last week — Marling’s had a long affair with music. Taught by her father, she picked up the guitar at age 3.
She and her sisters were raised on their parents’ vinyl collection of genre-reshaping songwriters of the ’60s and ’70s: Joan Baez, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. “The Needle and the Damage Done” was the first song she learned on the guitar as a toddler (yeah, it was hardly “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”), and this set the tone for the caliber of music to come.
Marling’s music features complex guitar work, unique instruments, modal melodies and thoughtful, imaginative lyrics with themes of love and rage, God and devil, loyalty and betrayal, angels and demons, myth and reality. She told The New York Times her latest work, “A Creature I Don’t Know,” “is all about tugging and churning with goodness and darkness.”
Such vivid lyrics don’t make her an open book, though.
“It’s quite strange,” Marling told The New York Times. “I’m quite private. I wouldn’t be able to get up and play the songs every night if they really jabbed a piece of glass into my eye every night. They are personal. But they’re not confessional.”
Her newer work, from sophomore album “I Speak Because I Can” onward, sees Marling delving into bolder, darker, more independent territory. Songs on “A Creature” creep into areas we’ve not seen in her earlier work, even into distorted electric guitars which keep her from being pigeonholed by the folk genre.
After listening to Marling lay down the new, haunting track “Night After Night” once the band had gone home, her producer Ethan Johns told The New York Times, “By the end of the take, I was almost in tears.”
If you’re about to say, “Wow, she seems wise beyond her years,” please don’t. Sure, Marling’s songwriting is quite intelligent, sophisticated in its introspection and its debt to literature. Yet, she doesn’t see herself as mature as every unavoidable discussion of her precocity would make her out to be.
“It’s patronizing,” she told USA Today. “Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.”
And judging from Marling’s show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood last week, “intense” probably describes her best. Largely expressionless and ethereal during song, Marling isn’t all frowns, either. There’s an enigmatic, endearing pleasantness about her. During “Sophia,” the single from her latest album, Marling stopped the song, laughing about struggling to hit the low notes the song opens with. “I wrote it in that key,” she said, amused. “I’m a fool.”
Back to our Mumford enthusiasts. Is her name starting to sound vaguely familiar? Back in the day, Marcus Mumford (also her ex-boyfriend) used to drum for her. Marling and Mumford & Sons have appeared in each other’s work with frequency, even touring together. Her disinclination to interact with the audience shaped his interactive approach.
They also came together with Indian folk group Dharohar Project to release an EP in 2010. You might be skeptical, but it may be one of the better fusions of Eastern and Western music since Ravi Shankar first handed a sitar to George Harrison.
Other British artists like Noah and the Whale, with whom Marling got her start as a back-up singer at age 16, and Johnny Flynn also comprise the “West London folk scene.” Really, it’s a community who often collaborate. It’s sometimes called “nu-folk” by the British media, a label Marling told the New York Times is “painful — they don’t even spell it right.” I couldn’t agree more.
Her first album, “Alas I Cannot Swim” (2007) was followed by “I Speak Because I Can” (2010) and finally “A Creature I Don’t Know” (2011), the latest in her six-syllable titles, now available worldwide. Pick it up and say cheers to the renewal of the British Invasion.
