Laura Marling
She gained her first understanding of poetry through Leonard Cohen, her first grasp of femininity from Joni Mitchell, and her father played Neil Young covers in a hippie band in France when she was very young. The first songs she learned to play on guitar were the compositions of those songwriting icons. Consider Laura Marling, the literate folk-pop star from Eversley, England, an honorary Canadian, musically at least.
"Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were massive influences and massive in shaping what I do," says Marling, speaking from London. "And it's very clear to anybody now who listens to Night After Night that I've listened to Leonard Cohen."
Marling, the singer-songwriter with the whitest blonde hair and a maturity well beyond her 21 years, refers to a waltzing track off her strikingly poised third album, A Creature I Don't Know, produced by Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ryan Adams). Elegiac in structure, Night After Night has to it such graceful lines as "I showed you my hand once and you hit me in fear / I don't stand for the devil, I don't whisper in ears."
Asked about the song's Cohenesque-ness, Marling almost laughs. "I didn't realize quite how bad a rip-off that was until after we recorded it."
Beyond the maple-musical influences, the making of her third album was inspired by the work of Robertson Davies, the author and playwright who qualifies as the privately-schooled Marling's favourite writer. All told, she says, A Creature I Don't Know is a "Canadariffic album."
Does that qualify the disc as a nominee for next year's Polaris Prize? After all, this year's short list included one album about suburban Houston, conceived by an American (Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, which captured the award on Monday), and another by Michigan-raised experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson.
If not eligible for a Canadian trophy, then surely it qualifies for the British ones. Marling's first two efforts (2008's Alas I Cannot Swim and 2010's I Speak Because I Can) were both nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. More recently Marling captured the title of top female artist at this year's Brit Awards.
Last week, on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition, the superb Robert Harris spoke about Amy Winehouse and Tony Bennett, commenting that Bennett didn't shoot for hits in the beginning. Rather, he wanted a career – something that hothouse pop artists such as Lady Gaga can't think about, the pressure being on them to top the charts with one song or album on top of the next, swiftly as possible, darling, someone's coming behind you.
When Marling won the Brit – one she wasn't expected to win – she felt a sudden spasm of that pressure. She was "shocked and terrified" that something she'd worked to keep control over would now be forced on bigger audiences. "Suddenly, I felt it could all go horribly wrong," she explains. "I was worried that people would listen to my music for the wrong reason."
But the hit-making major-label machines of the past don't have the clout they once did; there are acts which grow organically, somewhat pesticide free, with Adeles and Arcade Fires raised free range in indie-music dales that compete credibly against the glitz (Gaga) and the mill-farmed (Susan Boyle).
As these are fine days for less manufactured types, Marling needn't have worried about losing grasp. "Two days after I won, everybody had forgotten that I'd won the Brit Award," she says, "and I was back to normal life."
As such, Marling felt no pressure to make her third album any sort of a follow-up to her first two albums. "I didn't have anything to prove or any statement to make," she says, about a record that took just 10 days to record, live off the floor. "It was a natural way of making music."
There's forthrightness to her singing – "by the time we were done, there was every chance that any hint of self-consciousness had left me" – brought out by an increasing self-assurance. The Beast is a crashing, brooding centrepiece. The Muse is swirling, jaunty and rootsy.
"My confidence has developed over the last few years, not necessarily having to do with my music" she says. "I've made the transition from being a child to feeling very much like an adult."
Marling isn't a confessional singer-songwriter, but I have to ask her about a line from the cathartic soar of All My Rage: "Cover me up, I'm pale as night / with a mind so dark, and skin so light." Is that her? "I suppose," she replies. "I've got a deep, dark and intense side of me, and I allow that persona that I have somewhere inside me to write the songs."
And the extreme lyrical themes? "Rage, desire, lust and love are much easier to write about," Marling says. "A happy person has better things to do than write songs."
Leonard Cohen, you imagine, would agree.
Laura Marling and band play Toronto's Great Hall on Sept. 23 and Montreal's Corona on Sept. 24.
Brad Wheeler