Laura Marling’s ‘Patterns in Repeat’: Euronews Culture’s Verdict

The first sounds heard on Laura Marling’s eighth album ‘Patterns in Repeat’ are the murmurings of her talking with her partner as a baby coos in the background. It’s a rare direct insight into the artist’s private life since the birth of her daughter last year.

Marling’s daughter is the focal point of the album. With the advent of her motherhood, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter has entered into a new contemplative phase that imbues the album with a gentler sense of lyricism, marked by her most stripped back instrumentation. Rarely is there anything more than Marling’s acoustic guitar and a lightly reverberated string section audible.

Domestic bliss centres opening track ‘Child of Mine’ as Marling explicates her change in pace. “Life is slowing down but it’s still bitchin’,” she sings to her daughter. Melancholy marks the song through Marling’s ghostly voice.

It seems as if she’s responding directly to her last album’s title track ‘Songs for Our Daughter’ where she furiously denounced the grotesque patriarchal forces a hypothetical daughter might face. Where anger was last, Marling is more consumed by fear: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there, though I keep trying”. Nonetheless, those fears subside for her angelic refrain that she doesn’t want to miss a moment.

The album’s themes come through in ‘Patterns’ where over a delicate finger picking campfire lick, she reflects on how Marling’s understanding of womanhood has been refracted as she became the mother to her own “flock of birds”. It’s a pertinent thought from an artist whose career – defined by subcutaneous lyricism – began in earnest aged just 18.

Many of Marling’s fans have grown up with her. From that first album ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ in 2008 to her perfectly timed lockdown piece ‘Songs for Our Daughter’ in 2020, Marling has charted her life from the romanticism and rage of youth through to an earned maturity.

Some may miss the brasher instrumentation of the early albums or the bluesy experimentation of her middle period, but this latter Marling album – insane to say for a mid-30s artist but it’s her eight album – is performed with a gentle sensibility, almost as if not to wake a sleeping partner or child in the room next door.

Over the following three tracks, Marling’s old-school romanticism returns, echoing her long-standing comparison of Joni Mitchell. It’s on these songs and ‘The Shadows’ in particular that the English songwriter refers more directly to Leonard Cohen. Throughout, Marling dips into the character of a narrator concerned with her actions over a loved-one leaving an abusive situation.

That “I tried to persuade her, in vain, of course, later / That’s something that I deny / I thought it was better to say in my letter / That I never even tried” is an obvious riff on Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is only testament to Marling’s writerly confidence that she knows she can pull it off.

A mid-album accordion interlude reminds of the seaside and marks the transition of the album from reflections in her present day life to a look into the future. Next track ‘Caroline’ has Marling writing from the perspective of an older man aching for a romance that never impeded on her life but is still representative of a wound that never fully healed. “Caroline, we are old now / I got married, and I loved my wife / I have kids, they’re good and grown now / All in all, I’ve been happy with my life”. Once again, Cohen comes to mind and his relationship with Marianne Ihlen.

Over ‘Looking Back’, Marling contemplates a moment far in the future, when all she has is retrospection. She tells it sweetly with no animosity to youth, even suggesting that “somewhere beyond the dark / Love can be recovered”.

As ‘Patterns in Repeat’ draws to a close, the focus is once again on how life circles around, centring on the birth of her daughter. ‘Lullaby’ is a tender guide to blissful sleep before the titular ‘Patterns in Repeat’ takes life’s mistakes, it’s wrong-turn relationships, and even Marling’s own theorised potential regret at life in the music industry interrupting her time with her child.

Everything ends with a declaration of Marling’s singular focus on motherhood.

“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me / I want you to have a piece of my maternal flame / Part of me, eternity, a tolerance for pain.”

It seems to almost declare Marling’s departure from anything other than the life she’s created. If that proves to be the case, with this final work she’s created a sumptuous album rich with love and wisdom.

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Laura Marling’s ‘Patterns in Repeat’ is out now.