Album of the Day — July 30
Laura Marling — I Speak Because I Can
Laura Marling — I Speak Because I Can
30.July.2020
Laura Marling
I Speak Because I Can
2010
The Berkshire born Laura Marling moved to London in 2006, when she was 16. She wanted to be with her sisters … and be a singer.
She accomplished both.
Two years later, she released her debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, produced by Noah and the Whale frontman, Charlie Fink.
The album received a cavalcade of praise and was nominated for the Mercury Prize — to date, four of Marling’s seven albums received a coveted Mercury Prize nomination.
Mercury Prize — an annual music prize awarded for any album released by a British or Irish artist, or by a band where over 50% of the members are British or Irish. Their record labels submit the albums, and the shortlist gets chosen by an independent panel of musicians, music presenters, music producers, music journalists, festival organizers, and other figures in the music industry in the UK and Ireland.
Just turning 20, she recorded her second album, I Speak Because I Can, with producer Ethan Johns. Any concern of a sophomore slump was erased when the album received the same high praise and robust sales of her debut.
The album is thematically about the roles of men and women in society and book-ended by two songs motivated by the Odyssey by Homer. The first track, “The Devils Spoke,” is taken from the feminine point of view of Homer’s Odyssey.
The Devils Spoke
I might be a part of this
Ripple on water from a lonesome drip
A fallen tree that witness me
I’m alone, him and me
And then life itself can not aspire
To have someone be so admired
I threw creation to my king
With the silence broken by a whispered wind
All of this can be broken
All of this can be broken
Hold your devil by his spoke and spin him to the ground
I don’t think it takes too much imagination to understand what precisely the devil’s “spoke” is in this case.
And the last track, “I Speak Because I Can” is “informed” by the Margaret Atwood novella The Penelopiad, that addresses the impact of story-telling perspectives, double standards between the sexes and the classes, and the fairness of justice, again from a woman’s point of view.
“I Speak Because I Can” reads as an updated version of Penelope reminiscing on the events of the Odyssey
I Speak Because I Can
My husband left me last night
Left me a poor and lonely wife
I cooked the meals and he got the life
And now I’m just out for the rest of my time
For me
For he
For my
I speak because I can
To anyone I trust enough to listen.
You speak because you can
To anyone who’ll hear what you say.
I swear it was not my choice
I used to be so kind.
Never rode my bike down to the sea
Never finished that letter I was writing.
Never got up and shared anything
For me
For he
For my
While her songs are in the first person, Marling’s songs are not autobiographical.
On “Rambling Man,” Marling’s narrator is in conflict. On the one hand, she speaks, albeit in a resigned manner, to the sense of identity and belonging found within the traditional social constructs of gender:
“But give me to a rambling man
Let it always be known that I was who I am.”
On the other hand, our narrator speaks to the three antiquated roles of women — lovers, wives, and mothers, not seeming to be keen on those:
As Lover
And it’s hard to accept yourself as someone
You don’t desire
As someone you don’t want to be
As Wife
Creatures fade by night
Following things that aren’t right
And they’re tired and they need to be lead
You’ll scream and you’ll wail till they’re dead
As Mother
We’re beaten, battered, and cold
My children will live just to grow old
But if I sit here and weep
I’ll be blown over by the slightest of breeze
“Rambling Man” could be about the struggle of the modern woman to find a way to forge out her own identity.
The leap in lyrical maturity and self-confidence found in Marling’s songs on I Speak Because I Can belie her 20 years. It’s hard to imagine any of the current crop of pop-star ingenue’s writing songs this lyrically complicated.
According to Marling herself, “Made by Maid” is the story of a baby born and then left on a log in the forest. As the baby grows into a child, it teaches itself about the things around it, eventually finding its way to the real world. The grown child discovers how cruel the world is and retreats to the forest.
Once back, it finds another baby left on a log in the forest and proclaims, “loves labour is never lost.” It takes the baby and vows to teach it everything it knows about the world. and promises to raise the child:
“Took him under, took him on,
Taught him everything about the world I’d come to know.”
On the one hand, while the character in “Made by Maid” is not defined by gender, the most straightforward understanding is that it’s a woman. Within that context, it’s not hard to read the song differently.
Perhaps it’s the role of a woman to take a damaged man under her wings to help him see the beauty of the world as she sees it:
So left to wander blind, I find myself in cautious times,
And they say, Love’s labor is never lost; labor on to this very day.
So I walk into the fog, found a babe atop a log and all alone
Took him under, took him on,
Taught him everything about the world I’d come to know
“What He Wrote” was inspired by letters from a woman in Scotland to her husband in WW II. In an interview in 2012, Laura Marling said that the song “reflected a time in her own life when she was still looking for her identity as a young woman.”
What He Wrote
Forgive me, Hera, I cannot stay
He cut out my tongue
There is nothing to save
Love me, oh Lord
He threw me away
He laughed at my sins, in his arms I must stay
CHORUS
He wrote
I am broke
Please send for me
But I am broken too
And spoken for
Do not tempt me
Her skin is white and I’m light as the sun
So holy light shines on the things, you have done
So I asked him how he became this man
How did he learn to hold fruit in his hands?
And where is the lamb that gave you your name?
He had to leave, though I begged him to stay
Left me alone, when I needed the light
Fell to my knees, and I wept for my life
If he had’ve stayed, you might understand
If he had’ve stayed, you never would have taken my hand
CHORUS x1
And where is the lamb, that gave you your name?
He had to leave, though I begged him to stay
Begged him to stay in my cold wooden grip
Begged him to stay by the light of this ship
Me fighting him, fighting life, fighting dawn
And the waves came and stole him and took him to war
CHORUS x1
Forgive me, Hera, I cannot stay
Cut out my tongue, there is nothing to save
Love me, oh Lord
He threw me away
He laughed at my sins, in his arms I must stay
We write
That’s all right
I miss his smell
We speak
When spoken to
That suits us well
That suits us well
That suits me well
CRITICS:
Dave Simpson in The Guardian said: “The result is her first triumph: a collection of literary and emotional songs to have you whooping with joy or fighting off tears, with tunes that deliver new riches with each listen.”
Andy Gill in The Independent: “It’s [I Speak Because I Can] full of songs which twist and turn as you listen: titles laden with foreboding such as ‘Darkness Descends’ and ‘Devil’s Spoke’ end up rolling along with jaunty gait, their brisk momentum stippled with cheery banjo-picking, while a title as apparently positive as ‘Hope In The Air’ ponders questions like ‘Why should death be scared of living?’”.
James Christopher Monger at AllMusic wrote: “Love, death, and heartbreak are hardly new subjects when it comes to folk music, but they refresh themselves so often in our lives that their relevance becomes tenfold with each new bite, scrape, or blow to the head, a notion that Marling explores with both guarded wisdom and elegant petulance on standout cuts like ‘Devil’s Spoke,’ ‘Made by Maid,’ ‘Rambling Man,’ and ‘Goodbye England.’”
As you’re listening and think you hear a familiar voice on some of the songs, that’s because Marcus Mumford, of Mumford & Sons, is singing back-up.
The album charted well throughout Europe, and in the US, it was marketed as a folk album, where it peaked at #7 on the Billboard Folk Chart.
Accepting that I Speak Because I Can is indeed about gender roles and identity in society, the record does little to set the record straight. It’s a complicated issue, but what Marling has done here is add another depth of texture that can help foster empathy. And it’s through this understanding that we can see change, however slowly, take place.
The most important message of I Speak Because I Can is that you must speak because you can.