Photo by Joan Bowlen
BRIT-Award winning British songstress Laura Marling returns this May with the follow up to 2011’s acclaimed A Creature I Don’t Know. The new album, Once I Was An Eagle, was recorded in the English country studio of regular producer and instrumentalist Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ryan Adams, Vaccines), with Dom Monks on engineering duties and Marling’s lifelong friend Ruth de Turberville on cello. Not only was the process complete in just ten days, but Marling’s vocals and acoustic guitars were recorded live in one take—in one day. To that acoustic skeleton—which will be the sound of her upcoming solo tour, her first sans band—Marling and Johns then added textured layers of percussion and instrumentation. It’s a hugely ambitious record that echoes the dark themes of A Creature I Don’t Know.
This is Marling’s fourth album and the precocious and preternaturally talented British singer-songwriter has attained what sounds undeniably like vocal, emotional, and artistic maturity. It’s a record for the ages. Released at the age of twenty-three. Her already impressive career has so far included a 2011 Brit Award (UK Grammy-equivalent) for Best British Female Solo Artist, two Mercury Music Prize nominations, and an NME Award for Best Solo Artists.
When Marling began writing the songs that would become Eagle, she’d been “obsessively” collecting records from the year 1969. She was in the middle of a U.S. tour to promote A Creature I Don’t Know. She was about to let go of her band, feeling dislocated on the open road, and searching for what it meant to be an artist and a woman in the world at an age at which her contemporaries were busy doing keg stands. Eagle is a concept album, sort of. It follows a thread of mythology, lyrically and metaphorically. An eagle and a dove, the devil, and the sea populate her cast of characters; soundscapes ebb and flow like an epic plot, or, for that matter, an epic road trip across the States.
Once I Was An Eagle Tracklist
1. Take The Night Off
2. I Was An Eagle
3. You Know
4. Breathe
5. Master Hunter
6. Little Love Caster
7. Devil’s Resting Place
8. Interlude
9. Undine
10. Where Can I Go?
11. Once
12. Pray For Me
13. When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)
14. Love Be Brave
15. Little Bird
16. Saved These Words
