THE WREN
Not long ago I discovered a wren’s nest in a rose bush; from time to time I watched the bird building it beautifully, surreptitiously assembling small tufts of moss and tiny twigs. A few days later it seemed to be abandoned and began to disintegrate, perhaps because the wren’s mate had no interest in settling there, as the male typically builds several possible nests and the female chooses one of them, which she then lines with feathers. Just after I found it, I was led to a tender song by Paul McCartney, ‘Jenny Wren’, which tells the story of a young girl who abandons her love of singing because of a broken heart and the unkindness in the world (‘wounded warriors took her song away’), to which she is unusually sensitive. I was not aware of it before, but as it was mentioned by the singer-songwriter Laura Marling in an interview about her new album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’, I followed it up out of curiosity. Its gentle melody is delightful - worthy of a place on a Beatles album - and McCartney’s lyrics suggest that the young woman’s lost innocence becomes, through experience, her salvation, and that the world would do well to learn from her compassionate vision and example.
Laura Marling’s last record ended with the sound of someone walking out of the studio into a garden full of birdsong; like Nora in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, she seemed to be abandoning her past in order to discover herself anew. ‘Song For Our Daughter’, recorded a few years later, hints at how her life has developed since then. Marling has explained that the loose theme of the album (which is addressed to a fictional daughter) is loss of innocence, and how our culture rarely provides plausible ways for women to look after themselves. The record is deft and attractive, and it has been favourably reviewed. The writer for NME describes Marling’s voice as ‘comforting and crystalline’, going on to say that she comes across as ‘gentle and intelligent, humble and wholly kind-hearted’. The album as a whole ‘feels cohesive and like a safe haven’, and Laura Marling is a ‘lifeline and a source of stability’. ‘We’re lucky to have her’, she says.
Marling is often compared to Joni Mitchell, and ‘Song For Our Daughter’ further accentuates the comparison, especially in relation to ‘Blue’, the celebrated Mitchell album that was recorded fifty years ago. There are substantial differences between the two, but their tone and mood are close. In 1971 ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine commented that Joni Mitchell’s earlier records had been ‘instantly traditional’, combining realism, romance, and vulnerability, but ‘Blue’ was more explicitly autobiographical, a chronicle of the singer’s search for permanent love, and that ‘in portraying herself so starkly she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime’. Decades later, ‘Blue’ has generally been accepted as iconic and is even considered to be a ‘perfect’ record; its themes - leaving, journeying, independence, honesty and memory - are clearer in retrospect, and the album’s confessional quality, much emphasised by ‘Rolling Stone’, is now less obvious, probably because that kind of intimacy quickly became commonplace among singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Mitchell, however, has never belittled the autobiographical element of the record, latterly explaining that ‘Blue’ was written and composed at a turning-point in her life, after her innocence had been lost, and when she found that we have responsibility for our own lives and the discovery of our core values.
Despite its efforts to be forthcoming, Marling’s record is more emotionally reticent than ‘Blue’, and this may partly be due to her cultural background, the secure and constrained self-assurance of the English middle classes. In that respect Marling brings to mind the films of Joanna Hogg, which I’ve been watching enthusiastically in the past few weeks. Much admired by some and dismissed as boring and pretentious by others, they are about the psychological problems of well-off English people, whom Hogg depicts with merciless accuracy and quiet empathy. Hogg’s recent and semi-autobiographical ‘The Souvenir’ is perhaps the most relevant film in this context. Set in the 1980s, it focuses on the relationship between Julie, a sweet-natured film student, and her older boyfriend, Anthony, who may or may not work in the Foreign Office, and whose cultured and arrogant persona disguises deep unease and a dark secret. Julie lives in her parents’ pied-à-terre in London’s Knightsbridge, but she is trying, not altogether convincingly, to shed the trappings of privilege to which she is accustomed. Anthony, however, whose origins are a rung or two down the social ladder, gives the impression that civilised luxury is his natural milieu. Julie is attracted by his louche charm and accepts his occasional casual cruelty, so he cleverly establishes himself as a dominant influence on her life. For much of the film Julie is in Anthony’s thrall, her innocence a dramatic contrast to Anthony’s decline towards self-destruction, but she gradually develops a sense of awakened independence. Hogg’s visual sense is immaculate, and ‘The Souvenir’, like Laura Marling’s record, is remarkable for its good taste, composure and grace.
Another film that elegantly portrays the influence of an older man on a younger woman is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Phantom Thread’. The story also takes place in London, some thirty years earlier, and it describes the relationship between Reynolds Woodcock, a successful fashion designer, and Alma Elson, a shy foreign waitress whom he meets in a small country hotel and takes home to model for him. Woodcock, beautifully dressed, fastidious, and arrogant (although perhaps not quite the gentleman he considers himself to be) is in the habit of having affairs with young women and discarding them when he becomes bored or otherwise distracted. Woodcock is impossibly controlling and dismissive of Alma, and his sister, who lives with them, makes it clear to her that she will not long remain a favoured muse and companion. Alma, nonetheless, is not intimidated, and she pursues unconventional ways of balancing her relationship with Woodcock. Her innocence is lost, but her power is in the ascendant.
Fiona Apple (coincidentally, once the partner of Paul Thomas Anderson) has received much press attention of late, perhaps most significantly in a long ‘New Yorker’ profile entitled ‘Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity’, which reveals some of the complex layers of pain and emotional instability that lie behind her music. She has also released a new album, ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’, which has been even more ardently reviewed than Laura Marling’s ‘Song for Our Daughter’. While they both address many similar ideas and themes, Apple approaches them with real anarchy and eccentricity - in a ‘glorious eruption’, as ‘The Guardian’ describes it. According to the self-consciously hip ‘Pitchfork’, Apple’s early music was about ‘grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world’, but this album is ‘unbound’, ‘a wild symphony of the everyday’, and ‘liberationist’. ‘It’s not pretty’, the writer concludes; ‘it’s free’. More succinctly, to paraphrase the reviewer in ‘The Guardian’, the record is a refusal to be silenced.
Laura Marling’s last record ended with the sound of someone walking out of the studio into a garden full of birdsong; like Nora in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, she seemed to be abandoning her past in order to discover herself anew. ‘Song For Our Daughter’, recorded a few years later, hints at how her life has developed since then. Marling has explained that the loose theme of the album (which is addressed to a fictional daughter) is loss of innocence, and how our culture rarely provides plausible ways for women to look after themselves. The record is deft and attractive, and it has been favourably reviewed. The writer for NME describes Marling’s voice as ‘comforting and crystalline’, going on to say that she comes across as ‘gentle and intelligent, humble and wholly kind-hearted’. The album as a whole ‘feels cohesive and like a safe haven’, and Laura Marling is a ‘lifeline and a source of stability’. ‘We’re lucky to have her’, she says.
Marling is often compared to Joni Mitchell, and ‘Song For Our Daughter’ further accentuates the comparison, especially in relation to ‘Blue’, the celebrated Mitchell album that was recorded fifty years ago. There are substantial differences between the two, but their tone and mood are close. In 1971 ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine commented that Joni Mitchell’s earlier records had been ‘instantly traditional’, combining realism, romance, and vulnerability, but ‘Blue’ was more explicitly autobiographical, a chronicle of the singer’s search for permanent love, and that ‘in portraying herself so starkly she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime’. Decades later, ‘Blue’ has generally been accepted as iconic and is even considered to be a ‘perfect’ record; its themes - leaving, journeying, independence, honesty and memory - are clearer in retrospect, and the album’s confessional quality, much emphasised by ‘Rolling Stone’, is now less obvious, probably because that kind of intimacy quickly became commonplace among singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Mitchell, however, has never belittled the autobiographical element of the record, latterly explaining that ‘Blue’ was written and composed at a turning-point in her life, after her innocence had been lost, and when she found that we have responsibility for our own lives and the discovery of our core values.
Despite its efforts to be forthcoming, Marling’s record is more emotionally reticent than ‘Blue’, and this may partly be due to her cultural background, the secure and constrained self-assurance of the English middle classes. In that respect Marling brings to mind the films of Joanna Hogg, which I’ve been watching enthusiastically in the past few weeks. Much admired by some and dismissed as boring and pretentious by others, they are about the psychological problems of well-off English people, whom Hogg depicts with merciless accuracy and quiet empathy. Hogg’s recent and semi-autobiographical ‘The Souvenir’ is perhaps the most relevant film in this context. Set in the 1980s, it focuses on the relationship between Julie, a sweet-natured film student, and her older boyfriend, Anthony, who may or may not work in the Foreign Office, and whose cultured and arrogant persona disguises deep unease and a dark secret. Julie lives in her parents’ pied-à-terre in London’s Knightsbridge, but she is trying, not altogether convincingly, to shed the trappings of privilege to which she is accustomed. Anthony, however, whose origins are a rung or two down the social ladder, gives the impression that civilised luxury is his natural milieu. Julie is attracted by his louche charm and accepts his occasional casual cruelty, so he cleverly establishes himself as a dominant influence on her life. For much of the film Julie is in Anthony’s thrall, her innocence a dramatic contrast to Anthony’s decline towards self-destruction, but she gradually develops a sense of awakened independence. Hogg’s visual sense is immaculate, and ‘The Souvenir’, like Laura Marling’s record, is remarkable for its good taste, composure and grace.
Another film that elegantly portrays the influence of an older man on a younger woman is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Phantom Thread’. The story also takes place in London, some thirty years earlier, and it describes the relationship between Reynolds Woodcock, a successful fashion designer, and Alma Elson, a shy foreign waitress whom he meets in a small country hotel and takes home to model for him. Woodcock, beautifully dressed, fastidious, and arrogant (although perhaps not quite the gentleman he considers himself to be) is in the habit of having affairs with young women and discarding them when he becomes bored or otherwise distracted. Woodcock is impossibly controlling and dismissive of Alma, and his sister, who lives with them, makes it clear to her that she will not long remain a favoured muse and companion. Alma, nonetheless, is not intimidated, and she pursues unconventional ways of balancing her relationship with Woodcock. Her innocence is lost, but her power is in the ascendant.
Fiona Apple (coincidentally, once the partner of Paul Thomas Anderson) has received much press attention of late, perhaps most significantly in a long ‘New Yorker’ profile entitled ‘Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity’, which reveals some of the complex layers of pain and emotional instability that lie behind her music. She has also released a new album, ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’, which has been even more ardently reviewed than Laura Marling’s ‘Song for Our Daughter’. While they both address many similar ideas and themes, Apple approaches them with real anarchy and eccentricity - in a ‘glorious eruption’, as ‘The Guardian’ describes it. According to the self-consciously hip ‘Pitchfork’, Apple’s early music was about ‘grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world’, but this album is ‘unbound’, ‘a wild symphony of the everyday’, and ‘liberationist’. ‘It’s not pretty’, the writer concludes; ‘it’s free’. More succinctly, to paraphrase the reviewer in ‘The Guardian’, the record is a refusal to be silenced.