With Semper Femina, Laura Marling explores what it’s like to be a woman
A conversation with Laura Marling about her work can quickly turn academic, riddled with reading lists and sociological arguments. She’s smart, self-aware, thoughtful and sincere; she laughs often. But Semper Femina, the sixth album from the 27-year-old artist, doesn’t sound like an academic exercise. It’s full of beautiful, complex, artful folk songs: melancholy, conflicted and empathetic. It’s an album about women—the title comes from a line from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Varium et mutabile semper femina,” which translates, roughly, as “Fickle and changeable always is woman.” In Marling’s hands, the line is an endorsement rather than a critique.
Marling was inspired by reading about the relationships of several muses: painters Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst; sculptors Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin; psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé and poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She became interested in “whether being a female muse was inherently subjugating or not,” she says, and chose to explore the question by writing about her own female acquaintances. Of course, she’s aware of an inherent paradox in using these women as her muses for the songs.
“The muses: They were real, with artistic exaggerations,” Marling says of the songs’ characters. “I was experimenting with seeing what would happen if the gaze is mine and I’m not trying to subjugate anyone—I’m not the male gaze and don’t have any ill intent. It’s not like I asked permission of the people I’m writing about. It was liberating but also slightly anxiety-inducing to do that to somebody.”
On her previous LP, 2015’s Short Movie, Marling explored playing electric guitar, but she returns to the acoustic for Semper Femina, and not only because it lacks the masculine associations of an electric. “I’ve had an acoustic guitar on my lap pressed against my chest since I was six years old,” she says. “I missed that resonance, that relationship to it.”
Marling wrote the songs for Semper Femina in 2015 while on tour for Short Movie, but she continued to explore ideas of female creativity, specifically in the music industry, in a 2016 podcast series called Reversal Of The Muse, for which she interviewed artists such as Haim and Dolly Parton and a few of the rare female engineers and producers. But for Semper Femina, she chose a male producer, Blake Mills, known for his work with Fiona Apple and Alabama Shakes.
“What I discovered toward the end of working on the podcast is that I love working with men,” she says. “I wish there were more women around. I wished there was a female engineer around. I wanted a female producer who could do that task, but there’s just not enough. And it’s Blake Mills! It doesn’t get much better than that. After doing the podcast, I helped run an all-female-run-and-operated studio for a week. I was hoping there would be some great revelation that would come out of that. But actually there was no great revelation: Women do it exactly the same way men do, which sort of voided my whole exploration of whether we’re missing some great part of female creativity. There’s just not as much of it.”
—Steve Klinge
