Laura Marling’s latest album Patterns in Repeat, comes four years after her phenomenal album A Song for Our Daughter, nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2021 Grammy Awards. Perhaps you can draw some easy parallels; both of the central themes of each album are motherhood. But, oddly enough, Patterns in Repeat is about her newborn daughter (born in February last year), while A Song for Our Daughter is about an imaginary one.
The album opens with Child of Mine, an acoustic, stripped-back, homey, heartfelt song about the transformative experience of becoming a mother, opening with a recording of the joyful babble of a child accompanied by parental laughter. You get a huge sense of the environment in which the album was recorded. When I listen to it, I feel like I’m sitting on the carpet in Marling’s living room, as she strums her guitar. Marling’s tender vocals deepen the emotional resonance, creating a reflective and intimate atmosphere that captures the raw beauty of early parenthood—she asks “who would want to rush right through it, child of mine?” My favourite lyric: “Last night in your sleep you started crying/I can’t protect you there, though I keep trying/Sometimes you’ll go places I can’t get to/But I’ve spoken to the angels who’ll protect you.” It’s so calming, and possibly the best on the album. Patterns, on the other hand, is a fingerpicked love ode to becoming a grown up, to falling in love and embarking on the journey of motherhood, and to the future of a never-ending pattern of life. There is a reprise of it in the title track Patterns in Repeat (the penultimate song on the record) which serves to create a cyclicality—a pattern, if you will— that I really enjoy.
Some other reviewers have interpreted her song Your Girl as one that references a previous relationship (“I’ll always be your girl”), but on my first listen I thought that it was Marling telling her parents that, although she has now become a parent, she will always be their girl. I suppose you could interpret it either way, but I think the idea of a song dedicated to the transition from being a daughter to becoming a mother is a particularly poignant and nuanced perspective. The lyrics convey a sense of continuity—the eternal bond between parent and child—while also acknowledging the profound shift that comes with stepping into motherhood.
My other standout from this album is the exceptionally beautiful piano-led song No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can, which she released back in August. Although it could be assumed that the song is a romantic love song with the opening lines being “you were taking off your clothes in a bar by the road when I thought no one’s going to know you like I know”. In line with the rest of the album being about motherhood, and the likelihood that small kids take off their clothes (high), I interpret this song as another about the intimacy and unique bond of mother–daughterhood.
In her own words, No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can speaks to an album which hinges on “the drama of the domestic sphere, the frail threads that bind a family together, the good intentions we hold onto for our progeny and the many and various ways they get lost in time. So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday”.