Laura Marling - Song For Our Daughter

In 2013, Laura Marling recorded a full album but binned the entire thing, judging it, with somewhat startling honesty, “just a really boring album” – clear proof, if needed, of her questing talent. There have been other signs: writing music for Robert Icke’s theatre production of Mary Stuart, which involved reworking lyrics at someone else’s request (a first) and her collaboration a couple of years ago with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, as Lump.

They’re significant markers for a singer-songwriter who has always progressed fast, from the precociously talented teen (she recorded her Mercury-nominated debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, at 17) whose elegantly constructed, modern folk songs of a Laurel Canyon bent were carried by a pure, airy voice, to the mature auteur now of seven albums’ standing, rated by Graham Nash and Neil Young. But any strong creative identity has a symbiotic relationship with popular perception and it’s easy to imagine how an artist might start to feel trapped in its endlessly reflecting loop.