Laura Marling: 2024

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Laura Marling made her first appearance on WFUV in 2008 when she was just a shy, chain-smoking teenager who had an intuitive, uncanny way of writing that set her apart immediately as an extraordinary artist. A frequent (and beloved) guest at FUV for the past 16 years, Marling is as gifted a guitarist as she is a lyricist, and I've been fortunate to have many conversations with her, always marveling at her perceptive, wise assessment of love, loss, and other entanglements of life.

It's also been marvelous witnessing the many chapters of her life — through her teens, twenties and now thirties — all reflected in her albums, the most recent of which is her eighth, 2024's gorgeous Patterns in Repeat.  The album, released in October, parallels a new phase of Laura's life as the parent of a baby daughter, but it's not simply an album about being a new mother. Through 11 songs, Marling peers through a kaleidoscope of patterns in repeat — via her family and friends — with arresting beauty, incisive lyricism, and a commanding serenity. She asks the listener to slow down, experience granular moments, and the small miracles that life delivers, even when we face distressing times.

In this new FUV Live session, Laura and I chatted about her daughter Maudie and partner George, and the choice she made to have a child. The songs evolved at home over her first three months with the baby, who often was sat on her lap or napping nearby. Marling also spoke of her choice to limit her touring — choosing instead multi-day residencies this past October and November in London's St. John church in Hackney and New York's Bowery Ballroom, both of which I was fortunate to attend. And Laura also touched some other interests and side roads, from her master's degree is psychoanalysis to printmaking— as well as the financial tribulations that musicians face with streaming services.

Laura played solo in Studio A — with a guitar that had its own funny backstory — and chose three songs from Patterns in Repeat: "Caroline," "Patterns," and "The Shadows."

[Recorded: 11/8/24. Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Erin Merriman and Zack Tomassi; produced by Meghan Offtermatt. Videographers: Alena Godas, Anna Fahy, Louisa Schramm, Olivia Iannaccone and Mia Vilke.]