The drama of domestic life is, for the most part, predictable. There are people who play roles for which they are more or less suited. is there a limited setting; there are predetermined relationships. there are worn energies. We could call it a script. Laura Marling calls this “patterns in repetition.”
Marling—who began her career so young that she was once banned from her own concert—for years closely guarded her private and personal life, making herself a deliberate mystery. Her seventh disc-The song for our daughterreleased in spring 2020—marked a change. It moved away from the grand soundscapes of the previous three albums – its dark percussiveness I was an eagle once; his angry mist Short film; his sexy, tattered blues Semper Femina— and shed some of that early guard. Patterns in repetition it's even more intimate. There are soaring strings, yes, but no percussion, and Marling's voice never reaches its fullest tones. The songs are characterized by a homey stillness, and what sounds like Marling's insistence that there's beauty, as well as wisdom and joy, to be found within.
The record comes after the birth of her daughter. Indeed, at first glance, Patterns seems to be about motherhood, with titles like “Child of Mine”, “No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can” and “Lullaby”. The first of these songs opens the album with the sounds of domestic conversation: a man and a woman talking, a baby crying. The choice is structural, however, not thematic: Marling made the record in her home studio while her daughter was still an infant, and the illusory simplicity of the domestic is spread around the songs like frames. Is it their container? it is the place from which they start and the place to which they return.
Sometimes, Marling sounds closed from this pot. On a few songs (notably “Lullaby” and “Your Girl”), her voice stretches toward an impossible stillness. But more often—as in “Patterns on Repeat” and the plaintive “Looking Back,” written five decades ago by Marling's father—she seems comfortable with these new constraints, even encouraged by them.
