I requested an interview wih Laura Marling and I was turned down, hardly the first time for rock nyc: the miracle is when somebody I want to speak to wants to talk to me. Mary and Helen are much better at it –they get everybody they want. But me? Maybe I am a little too expectant. I relly don’t like doing interviews at all, but have strong opinions about her newbie…
Anyway, I got turned down and so I went in search of other other interviews and they fucking sucked. I could get more enlightening stuff out of her in five minutes than the diabolical Consequence Of Sound interview could in… well in how ever long they spent trying to get it.
Here is one of their questions: “When once asked what you wanted from the future your response included not ever wanting to suffer from complacency. You’ve said that playing gigs keeps you from falling into that trap but when you interviewed folk duo Smoke Fairies you asked them “Do you find it a battle to combat the repetitiveness of it?” If there is such repetitiveness, how then do you avoid complacency.”
That’s what they want to ask Laua Marling? What do these folks actually do for a living. The Guardian interview was substantially better then CoS, but still, they seemed to miss the point.
Perhaps she is better off not facing my questions.
Do you suffer from nostalgia?
Are you a Jungian?
Do you have a fear of attachment?
When you write lyrics are you working from an archetypical concept? The images seem aged.
Do you use a thesaurus?
Are you class conscious? Have you noticed how working class 1ds fans are?
Are you jealous of Ethan working with Paul McCartney?
On your last tour you didn’t bring a guitar tech. Why not?
Are you in love?
Who is your favorite musician? Writer?
How precocious is too precocious?
I could go on, but what I mean is I WOULD ASK INTERESTING QUESTIONS.
When I was a kid doing this, I was very aggressive at it. The reason was to take the musician out of their comfort zone and into a place where they had to go off script. At that time I was playing gotcha true, now I don’t do that but I got Marshall Crenshaw to admit he was disappointed with the success of his career and Chanel West Coast to discuss her teenage years creating parties and selling tickets.
I read the Spin interview and, you know, this could be partially Laura’s fault. The CoS interview is simply a dog, but Colin Joyce is trying to get her to express herself clearly here and Laura is not quite there with it:
On the first few songs, it seems like you’re tackling the subject of love in a more defiant way than you used to. Then things change over the course of the album. What can you tell me about its structure?
Near the end there’s a big change of tune, a quite literal change of tuning. That was interesting to me: the album was written in three different tunings and they all ended up representing something different. At the end of the record there’s this curiosity again about what it means to assimilate the idea of love into your life and how you can’t ever define it. So yeah, certainly a song near the beginning like “Master Hunter” represents a petty projection of love, but there is some relief when you get to the end.
A couple of things come to mind here, and one is that he should have contradicted Laura: that isn’t what happens in he album. The album is too long because EMOTIONALLY it doubles back on itself, it is like a flaw in a diamond and it hurts Once I Was An Eagle, while simultaneously making it a deeper. Like Imperial Bedroom, an album it resembles in structure (only that way, but in structure) it works best when it surmounts its weaknesses in the run through to the end, say the last five songs.
The problem with Laura’s reply is it is muso stuff. Guitar tunings? Please.
Even more interesting, Colin asks: “Did it seem like there were any unconscious connective threads?”, that’s a smart question but Laura punts it. Just the way she punted me.