ON THE PATRIARCHY

“I personally believe that patriarchy does not exist in the soul of man – but is rather the indiscriminate disembodied thing which gapes at the market in awe – believing that its movements cannot be intervened on, that its terrible, incessant slouch towards growth is a marvel that must be obeyed – against all instinct towards fairness and human dignity. It is the force that provokes people to look at the world solely through the prism of growth at any cost, turning humans into workforces, mothers into strains, artists into products – the earth into a garbage heap. I feel suspicious of artists who shield themselves in virtue while forcing their baited, adoring fans to pay astronimcal ticket prices and deliver fevered merch drops, forcing them to participate in a cultural spectacle that produces so much waste – while at once understanding this is the world we live in.”
—- The Tarot of Songwriting – The Chariot – 21 September 2024

ON JANE AUSTEN

“When I was growing up…I always thought that I would really like life in Jane Austen-era England; but that’s because I’d read that in books and gone, ‘That’s brilliant.’ Her female characters are just so cutting and witty and subtle. But then, you know, it was probably a pretty horrible life, being a woman in a house for ever. But I liked the idea of the way things were done then.”<
—- The Times of London – 31 March 2010

LOGICAL SONGS

“I’m not religious; I’m not romantic and I live purely by logic. I make every decision by logic and sometimes that leads me to the right and sometimes to the wrong decision. But if I don’t think about things logically, I can’t do it. Things will stress me out.”
—- The Sydney Morning Herald – 10 September 2011

ON JONI MITCHELL

“‘Court and Spark’ was the first album I owned that I listened to over and over. Its actually quite easy listening, the lyrics are simple but striking and the craftsmanship of the entire album is really special. She bridges a few gaps between genres she later went into with more depth, so it’s the one I always come back to, but it’s closely followed by ‘Blue’ and ‘Hejira’. I remember my father playing me ‘Same Situation’ when I was a nipper, and saying how nobody since has done melodies as well as Joni Mitchell, I concur. The thing that most affected me was just her resonance, and that is something she must have been born with.”
—- For Folks Sake – 25 May 2010

FASHION SHOOTS

“I don’t do fashion shoots or have my make-up done because I think that is not the point of me. It’s a very respectable point of some people, but not me, but as a result of that, I’ve sort of felt like I’ve had to leave my sexuality behind in my career. It’s not a huge part of my private persona but it is a part of it and it’s so weird that it’s not a part at all of my public persona.”
—- The Line of Best Fit

INSPIRATION

“A singer, who’s now a big singer, once said to me: ‘It’d be so cool to be really heartbroken because it’d be good for my songwriting.’ I was like, ‘You silly, naive wally! Never wish that on yourself. It’s unbearable.'”
—- BBC News – 9 March 2017

FREUD

“Salomé believed Freud’s idea of penis envy was incorrect. Women do not feel they lack a penis. It’s more that they are like hermaphrodites, and entirely self-contained sexually. Freud acknowledged to Salomé that he might have been wrong, so can you imagine what would have happened if our entire western psyche wasn’t based on this idea that women lack a penis? I believe my predominant energy is masculine, even though I’m definitely feminine too.”
—- The London Times – August 2016

THE NOTION OF THE ‘TRAGIC WOMAN’

“I’m interested in people’s perception of the characters I’ve written and played with on my records, because in my mind they’re characters that can’t be made tragedies of…Our culture loves female tragedy. It’s been so ingrained, over and over again, and there haven’t been enough written alternatives to tragic, solitary women. So that’s my main focus now: rewriting that idea of the +tragic woman.”
—- Newsweek – 20 November 2016

LEONARD COHEN

“He was a poet of extraordinary elegance and class, one of the rare realist-romantics, a genre from which I have drawn a (so far) short life and career’s worth of inspiration. His lyrical world is so vivid, melancholy, solitary but not, crucially, isolated. Modern story telling, grown up romantic turmoil. In my mind he was always in his late thirties, always wearing a suit, always looking on gently to the world wondering how to move through it, always pondering his last love affair, always making space in his heart for the next.”
—- Time Magazine – 18 November 2016

GUITARS

“I tour with Mason guitars but they’re built to be bashed around. They’re new ones, you know, so they don’t have a character yet. So the one I lost…was a really brilliant Guild Dreadnought, and one I’ve got with me now is a Martin D-45 or something, a Dreadnought. And I’ve got a couple of those, which makes me sound very privileged, but I have a touring collection of guitars. My precious one that I don’t take anywhere – in fact I’ve moved to Los Angeles and I refuse to take it with me on the plane so it’s still in London – is a Martin M-38 from the ’80s, the year that they stopped allowing guitars to be made in Brazilian rosewood, so it’s the last Brazilian rosewood guitar.”
—- The Current – August 2013

GENDER AND CREATIVITY

“I would say that feminine creativity is inherently different from the masculine, I had a lot of chats with Blake [Mills, Semper Femina’s producer], when we were making the record, about how we started playing guitar, and he was like: ‘I started playing because I wanted to impress girls.’ And that was obviously so different from why I started playing guitar – that was never in my brain, to impress boys. So even that crucial difference makes for a different musician. For me, playing guitar has always been tied up with my identity rather than enticing people in, it’s always been involved in myself.”
—- The Guardian – 26 January 2017

THE IDEA OF BEING

“With a fear of death comes a fear of insignificance, and I thought well, whatever happens I’m going to be ok because I’ve done some things. It’s not about being something as in being famous; it’s being something as in being something to someone. And for me, the idea of being something is actively doing something with your life that positively impacts other people. If you can make people’s day a bit better. You don’t have to fix their problems, but you just have to make them feel a little more secure.”
—- Promo for album I Speak Because I Can – 8 December 2015

TECHNOPHOBIA

Asked by Daniel Rachel if she records ‘little ideas’ and then builds from them, Marling said: “No, it’s all from memory. I’m a complete technophobe. Sometimes if I finish a song very quickly then I write it down because I’ll definitely forget it the next day. But I can’t read or write music so I do write down chords and stuff.”
—- Isle of Noises – Conversations With Great British Songwriters

ON SINGING CONTESTS

“It’s teaching the wrong thing, I think, teaching that you want fame.” said Marling. “It’s not fame that you want, it’s satisfaction, which is a very different thing, but they sometimes go hand in hand. It makes me sad.”

— BBC 4 Radio’s Today Programme

UNRELEASED MUSIC

Asked what she’d want done with unreleased music after she died, Marling replied: “It makes me think of the album that I shelved [between ONCE I WAS AN EAGLE and SHORT MOVIE] and how crap it is, and how much of a product of a shitty time in my life it was. I wouldn’t want to inflict that on anyone.”
—- Vice.com – 21 February 2017

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