References to birds abound, and childhood. She is, still, a 23-year-old figuring it all out, but one who sings things like "When we were in love/I was an eagle/and you were a dove," never wallowing, always sifting for silver in the silt of human relations. It speaks more directly of her own hard-won romantic qualifications. Well, it worked for Richard Thompson.Īs the translucence of those lines suggest, …Eagle leaves behind, to some extent, the cat-and-mouse fictionalising of Marling's earlier songs, which were often inspired by literary sources or heavily cloaked scenarios. Reading between the lines, she may have followed her heart (there is a "new friend, across the sea", whose life she asks to be "figured into" on When Were You Happy?). Once I Was an Eagle finds this very English singer-songwriter living in LA (although not, as you might have assumed, in Laurel Canyon). Non-guitar sounds including organ and lap steel are provided by multi-instrumentalistproducer Ethan Johns and two close friends: Ruth de Turberville on cello (she provides the vinyl-flipping Interlude halfway in) and keyboardist Peter Roecorrect, on board since the first record. Unlike her more recent albums, this one features mostly Marling herself, bandless, becoming more and more erudite on guitar, unleashing elegiac ragas and Spanish cat's cradles (the expressive Little Love Caster. Rather, Marling's confidence and expressive range continue to expand (there are mutters, hums, trills and swallowed syllables galore) her musical sextant points south, and east, towards influences beyond Joni.Įverything just gets better and better with Marling. Who was this waifish blond 18-year-old that, on her debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, was throwing maxims down from the mountain with such sagacity? Five years on, you could argue that Marling has grown into that didacticism with some life experience.īut that is not really why this album feels more mature. It used to be remarkable for its precocity. Marling's haughty tone was certainly derived, initially, from the Bob Dylan/Joni Mitchell axis of finger-wagging folk. "I will not be a victim of romance," she declares at one point. The first four tracks of … Eagle run into each other, a kind of EP-within-an-album united by mood and subject matter there is a short film online called When Brave Bird Saved that treats them as one. Or it might be the third movement of one overarching album-opening salvo. "Damn all those people who don't lose control/Who will never take a foot out of life/You might not think that I care/But you don't know what I know," she sings disdainfully on You Know, the third song on Once I Was an Eagle. Laura Marling, now on her fourth album, can deliver a haughty line with the assurance of a master.
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