Singer-songwriter Laura Marling: 'I had abandoned my sexuality and was scared by the disappearance of my feminine side'

Laura Marling is a romantic soul. The singer-songwriter, a darling of the nu-folk movement, has found success and critical acclaim for her low-key songwriting – with dreamy and heartfelt lyrics set to fragile melodies.

It is heady, emotional stuff. So it comes as some surprise to hear the 27 year-old say her latest album – all about being a woman – comes from a particularly “masculine time” in her life.

“It was a certain time when I’d sort of gone on this trip of abandoning any sexuality,” she says. “Now in retrospect I was hopped up on the times, but I was living in LA, and LA does have an amazing knack for removing sexuality. I found it quite scary; I was scared of what I perceived to be the disappearance of my feminine side. But it gave me an ability to look at women in a different way and consider how I’d been looked at.”

She says she approached the album, Semper Femina, as a man writing about a woman, but then realised she didn’t need to.

“The title comes from a Virgil poem, and the full quote from the poem is ‘Varium et mutabile semper femina’, which I might be pronouncing wrong, but the translation is: ‘fickle and changeable, always a woman’ – so it’s better off as just ‘always a woman’,” she says.

“We’re somewhat accustomed to seeing women through men’s eyes, and naturally that was my inclination to try and take some power over that, but I very quickly realised that the powerful thing to do was to look at women through a woman’s eyes.

“It was a little stumble at the beginning of the record, a self conscious stumble, but yes that’s where that came from.

“I don’t need to pretend it’s a man to justify the intimacy, or the way I’m looking and feeling about women.

“It’s me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them, and by proxy, towards myself.”

Hampshire born Laura is no stranger to adulation. Her debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim was nominated for a prestigious Mercury Prize – as were two of her next three LPs. A figurehead of the swing back to acoustic folk-influenced songwriting which shaped British pop and indie-rock 10 years ago (appeared in the original line-up of Noah and the Whale, working with Mystery Jets and members of Mumford & Sons)

She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brit Awards, and was again nominated three more times.

This, her sixth album is out on her own More Alarming Records label. Written on the road, it was recorded in Los Angeles, produced by Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Jim James). Its loose lyrical thread strings together her freshly observed take on womanhood. It addresses questions of how society views sexuality and gender but without seeking to provide definitive answers.

It also follows her own voyage of self-discovery and her growth as an artist, performer, and as an individual over the course of her career.

The album follows the success of Laura’s podcast series, Reversal of the Muse. An exploration of femininity in creativity, the collaborative project opened up an important conversation around whether the lack of feminine presence in the studio would ultimately make any difference at all to the creative outcome. Guests included HAIM, Karen Elson, Vanessa Parr, Dolly Parton, Shura, and Emmylou Harris.

How was the album influenced by her own experiences as a woman artist? “I’ve done a lot of travelling on my own and touring on my own,” she says. “It can sound super romantic and glamorous, but dragging three or four guitars around and throwing them in the back of a car constantly, is a big mental and physical exertion – and it can be a little bit scary you know.

“Literally being alone, getting paid, doing all that stuff... I’m sure it’s scary for men as well, but I’ve been aware of that restriction of women travelling and that’s been the most relevant thing to me.

“I have this great fear of travelling alone now and I just noticed that innate sense of fear is really quite constricting – and perhaps more of an affliction to women than to men.”

The lyrics touch on romantic and literary themes. Is literary fiction an inspiration? “I used to read a lot of fiction and I don’t any more, but I read a lot poetry,” she says.

“Gothic romantic literature used to play quite a big part in my vocabulary of emotional experience. Now that I have my own emotional experiences, I like drawing on them and delving into poetry more, as well as fictional fantasy.

“My favourite poet is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was a bit of a hopeless romantic. He’s the reason I started writing this record in some ways, because I was researching his life for writing the libretto for an opera. He was dressed as a girl until he was eight, which had quite a profound effect on his relationship to women and made him something of an obsessive woman-fancier.”

The album is accompanied by Laura’s directorial debut with the video for the album’s opening track, Soothing. Its inspiration was a series of vivid dreams she experienced while making the album.

How did she find the creative process of directing a video as opposed to songwriting?

“I’m more comfortable talking about the directing, than I am the music, which is weird,” she says.

“The directing was amazing. I don’t often get the opportunity, or I’ve never been inclined to give visual representation to my music personally. The way that music is released now is to have a visual accompaniment, so to give my lucid dreaming quality to this, which is where I get a lot of imagery from, was an amazing experience.

“It requires a lot of people to be in that image with you, so you have to draw so many people in to that image with you.

“That annoying extra prop that costs lots of money, has to be there because it has symbolic value. It was fun, really fun.

“I found it one of the more easy, creative things I’ve ever done. I’d love to do more in the future.”

The album was also shaped, she says, by her experience of living and working in America.

“I love America and find America very infuriating for the same reason,” she says.

“I love it because Americans give a lot of value to artists, and everyone is an artist which is quite nice if you’ve devoted your career, inadvertently in my case, to being an artist.

“It also makes you feel good about yourself. Though it does give a very strange over-the-top reverence to people who have lived very self indulgent lives and demand to be called artists.

“And that represents my own inner tussle: a constant tussle over whether something is an indulgence or a compulsion. America gave me a bit more freedom to indulge in that compulsion to create music, funnily enough because I went there to not do that. And that’s what happened to me. I got pulled into that again.

“In that way it gave me a lot of freedom to express myself without self criticism that I should be doing something more important, or more useful!”

Laura Marling plays the O2 Academy Oxford on Monday. Tickets from ticketweb.co.uk