‘Soothing’: Decoding Laura Marling’s most political work
In the recent indie film The Ballad of Wallis Island, a disgruntled folk star turned pop star, played by Tom Basden, tries to convince his former bandmate and ex-lover, played by Carey Mulligan, to get back with him both musically and romantically.
“You don’t love me, OK?” Mulligan responds, dismissing the gesture in a refreshingly anti-romcom way, “You love the past. And it was great, it was, but it’s gone now. It’s time to grow up”.
There is a bit of a similar vibe going on in the opening track of indie singer/songwriter Laura Marling’s fantastic 2017 album Semper Femina, which, despite having the pleasant title of ‘Soothing’ is quite unnerving in its initial rhythm and tone, told from the perspective of a woman rejecting the unwanted attempts of an ex-lover to return to her life.
“Oh, my hopeless wanderer / You can’t come in / You don’t live here anymore,” Marling sings with calm determination.
Some Marling fans have presumed that the song may have been inspired by or directed at the singer’s real-life ex, the folk star turned pop star Marcus Mumford, as it certainly doesn’t seem coincidental that Mumford & Sons had a song five years earlier called ‘Hopeless Wanderer’. What is a bit weirdly coincidental, however, is that Marcus Mumford is now married to the aforementioned Carey Mulligan. Not sure if that’s art imitating life or the other way around.
In any case, ‘Soothing’ still stands almost a decade later as one of the most captivating songs in Marling’s discography. It’s an interesting mix of a sort of feminist incantation against a dark spirit (“I banish you with love”), and an internal plea for self-healing, as swirling strings arrive with the chorus, seeing the singer delivers the lines, “I need soothing / my lips aren’t moving / my God is brooding”.
‘Soothing’ sets the tone for an album with a title that literally translates to ‘always woman’, and deals consistently with Marling’s evolving views on female identity and empowerment. It was unavoidably influenced by what was then a new Trumpian reality after the 2016 US election, which took place when she was living in Los Angeles.
“I was thinking a lot about femininity and its relevance to me,” she told Billboard at the time, “It seems all the more prominent now. And it crept its way into the songwriting… It just made me think a lot about the difficulties and strengths [of being a woman]. It’s watching [my friend] bringing up her child in a time where we’ve got a president that talks about things like grabbing women by the pussy.”
Not content to just report on or protest the world around her, Marling experiments with flipping the usual ‘male gaze’ of pop music on Semper Femina. Along with dismissing the returning lover on ‘Soothing’, she writes from the perspective of a woman gazing longingly upon another woman on ‘Nouel’; a song she originally wrote by imagining a male perspective, but then chose to take ownership of with her own eyes.
“I understand why the extremities of our feelings towards people have to be restrained in some way,” Marling said, “because of the way we’d be at the whim of our emotions. That’s not how we function in modern society. But I was interested to remind myself that we are basically suppressing the whim of our emotions constantly. That is our human nature.”
