(Partisan/Chrysalis)Written to an imaginary child about ‘what it is to be a woman in this society’, the singer’s seventh album is alternately intimate, sneering and sad, and lavished with gorgeous melodies
Laura Marling has described her seventh solo album as a kind of conceptual work. Song for Our Daughter, she says, is about “trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society”. The songs are written to an imaginary child, offering her “all the confidences and affirmations I found so difficult to provide myself”. It has also turned up months earlier than expected. Scheduled for release in August – the beginning of the annual three-month season when albums by major artists traditionally appear – it has been brought forward. “In light of the change to all our circumstances,” Marling wrote on
Instagram, “ I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and, at its best, provide some union.”