On the titular track from Laura Marling’s last album, Song for Our Daughter, she sings to an imaginary child. Through leveled warnings and gentle affirmations, the artist breathes confidence into the figurative little girl on the other end of the line. But Marling wasn’t sure she even wanted to be a mother. Then 30 years old and an established singer-songwriter with enough passions to fill multiple lifetimes, the track was inspired by Roman mythology and American institutional injustice rather than the artist’s desire to parent a child. It wasn’t until a friend told Marling that parenthood would be the greatest thing to ever happen to her that, as she explains it, “a bolt of lightning” shot through her. Ambivalence eclipsed by clarity, the artist has since given birth to a daughter, translating the echoes of that lightning strike on her eighth studio album, Patterns in Repeat.
It’s an electricity distilled into simplicity. The first few sounds you hear on the 11-track, 35-minute record cast an atmospheric anchor that remains for the entirety of the album: Fingers sliding up the neck of a guitar; a strum; Marling’s laughter; a baby’s babbling. By the time the folk artist plucks the opening melody of “Child of Mine,” you’re fully immersed in her bubble of domesticity. Dad is dancing in the kitchen—the nights are sleepless, the moments fleeting. She’s rocking her baby to sleep (“Lullaby”) and reflecting on the singularity of a mother’s love (“No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can”). It is joy chiseled down to its most utterly uncomplicated.
By all accounts, motherhood changes you. On Patterns in Repeat, those shifts can be heard as much as they can be felt. The album is the most sonically stripped-down project of Marling’s catalogue. With no percussion, the record’s heartbeat is pulled from an intimate lexicon: a lulling piano on “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can”; propulsive guitar plucks on the Leonard Cohen-esque “Caroline”; weaving string arrangements on “Patterns.” Much of the album was recorded with Marling’s daughter in the room, inspiring a soundscape gentle enough not to stir a newborn from their slumber.
Yet while her sound has been softened, Marling’s conviction remains sharp. Like many 30-something-year-old women, I find myself at the intersection of biological clocks, Hallmark aversion, and an increasingly dominant discourse about the pains of motherhood. What will it take from me? What might I regret? In a pile-up of content (understandably) highlighting the difficulties of being a mom, Marling’s euphoric certainty is a refreshing counteragent. “I want you to know that I gave it up willingly,” she sings to her daughter on the album’s title track. “Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me.” Over the course of Marling’s career, she’s fiercely protected her notions of freedom and independence as they relate to womanhood. And yet, while many women might fear motherhood as the ultimate threat to those values, Patterns in Repeat suggests the opposite.
The album also offers a level of first-person access we don’t always get from Marling. Though the artist’s discography is undeniably personal, she has described her own songwriting style as autobiographical “with a pinch of salt.” Her meditations are often delivered from external vantage points, sourced from the many characters that line her bookshelf. She’s channeled Homer’s Odyssey (“Devil’s Spoke,”) John Steinbeck (“Salinas,”) Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (“I Speak Because I Can,”) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (“Hope in the Air.”) Over the course of her career, Marling’s ability to capture realities outside of her own lived experience has led many to affix a “beyond her years” qualifier to the singer-songwriter’s wisdom. But on Patterns in Repeat, Marling’s feet are firmly rooted in reality.
And yet, the album is not the sonic equivalent of a friend pulling out their phone to show you 20 unsolicited photo variations of their child eating an ice cream cone. Though informed by her experience as a new mother, Patterns in Repeat centers around the universal reckonings that come with age. “Your Girl,” addressed to a parent, considers the invisible string that binds us to the people who raised us, and the inevitable pain that comes when that string is severed. The track will gut you, on account of Marling’s particular brand of hurts-so-good catharsis. “Patterns” is a reflection of time’s imprint on family; “Looking Back,” originally written by Marling’s dad when he was in his 20s, is a retrospective on young love. The latter is a nod to the richness of our parents’ lives before us, and how unknowable that past often remains, no matter how much we crave to fill the gaps.
The cycles explored on Marling’s album are not just the rituals of motherhood, but the intergenerationality that binds us all. From parent to child and back again, these transitions can be as painful as they are beautiful. But they are also inevitable. The feat of Patterns in Repeat is not only that Marling has managed to hold all of these truths at once, but that she is able to do so in a way that comforts rather than concerns. Repetition can be monotonous. Daunting. Overwhelming. But the cyclical is also certain, and that certainty, like Marling’s album, can be a salve.
Emilie Hanskamp is a Toronto-based freelance journalist who writes about music and pop culture. You can find her, and her obsessively curated music recommendations, on Instagram @emhanskamp.
