‘I Speak Because I Can’: How Laura Marling turned teenage hormones into a masterpiece
Laura Marling was only a teenager when she made her debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim. Some of the songs on there, she wrote at only 16. But like all teenagers when they pass the age of 18 and believe they’re instantly and magically an adult now, by the time she made her follow-up at 19, she thought she had it all sussed out. It’s only in retrospect from further into adulthood that she can hear the album for what it is: an impassioned take on raging and messy teenage hormones.
To the artist, her debut record is simple. She’s never been shy about admitting that she doesn’t like it, seeing it more as a necessary part of her story than part of her artistic puzzle. “I don’t really think of this as part of my catalogue,” she said. Instead, her debut exists as simply a time capsule of that young girl figuring things out, with the album sessions being the first times she ever really stepped into a studio.
“The difference between being 16 and being 19 is quite a shift, isn’t it?” she said when it came to talking to Uncut about her sophomore release, I Speak Because I Can. It’s a beautiful thing really, how Marling’s discography and her thoughts on it track her growth not only as an artist but as a person. Just like every other teenager on the planet, her sophomore record captures that moment where you think you know everything. At 19, Marling thought she was a fully formed thing, a real adult. She thought she was suddenly very wise and smart and ready to sit at the grown-up table, only to look back on it now and see herself as a child still.
However, it’s those teenage hormones and that lofty sense of self that comes with youth that even allowed the album to happen. Despite him turning her down to make her debut album, Marling, bolstered by this impression that she was grown now, went back to Ethan Johns and asked him, again, to work with her. John has a powerful resume, including the likes of Paul McCartney, Kings Of Leon, Paolo Nutini, Rufus Wainwright and many more, so Marling had grand visions of being amongst them.
She recalled, “As we were walking around Real World, he said, ‘It’s never really worked out for me, working with female artists, I seem to not do well with it.’” But in the arrogance of youth, she wouldn’t be put off. She remembered, “So, being in my tomboy/late teenage years, I was like, ‘Well, I’m not like every girl, it’s going to be a totally different experience’, and it was.”
In it’s subject matter too, I Speak Because I Can captures the energy of late youth and the stretch into adulthood. Becoming more aware of society, politics and the patriarchy, Marling said that the album was interested in “responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood.” But she’s also undeniably interested in her own intellect and all the things she was learning at the time.
“I’d read The Odyssey, and I obviously thought I was quite clever because of that, so a lot of it was based around Penelope and Odysseus, and Hera – there’s a lot of Greek mythology and Classics, I was really into it then,” she said. It was also greatly informed by her new interest in open tunings that would stick around and still colour her work today.
Overall, from its context to its content, I Speak Because I Can is an album born from the boldness of youth. It’s a product of that specific period where a teenager thinks they’re an adult but has yet to be made to feel otherwise in the big bad world. So, for a golden second, everything feels possible. In Marling’s own words, she said, “I was also going through the unbelievable intensity of anybody’s late teenage years, I was so full of fucking hormones and excitement. I remember writing a lot, it was a good time.”
