Marling spent an hour taking questions from students Sonic PR

It’s midafternoon at the bar above Goldsmiths Students’ Union, and Laura Marling is playing a song from her new album. It’s incongruous for an artist as prolific as Marling, who has released six albums, won a Brit award and been nominated twice for the Mercury Prize, to be performing in a venue usually reserved for local music and comedy acts – but, then again, this is a particularly unusual event. It’s a student-only press conference, with young journalists from all over the country attending to ask Laura questions and hear her perform new songs.

The new album is called Semper Femina, a title cropped from a longer line by Virgil: “fickle and changeable always is woman”. Marling’s abbreviation changes the meaning to “always a woman”, and her clear, feminist intentions are indicative of much of the discussion at Goldsmiths. Ever an artist interested in the status of women in creative industries, she comments that there is “a lot more to catch up on for women” and that rectifying such inequalities would give us a “more balanced understanding of the world”. However, her views are rarely defined. Indeed, she says that she often feels too pressured to hold a “firm opinion” on issues relating to femininity, and has used projects like her Reversal of the Muse podcast to “keep asking questions” rather than come to definite answers.

She has previously said that the new album came from a “particularly masculine” time in her life and that she initially tried to approach it like a man writing about a woman – a sort of infiltration of the male gaze. But when Varsity asks for more details, she is hesitant to answer. Eventually, she says something rather interesting: that we are “accustomed to seeing women through men’s eyes”, and that her first inclination was to “try and take some power over that” by emulating a masculine perspective. But then she dismisses this approach, calling it a “stumble”, and says that she ultimately found it more “powerful to look at women through a woman’s eyes”. It’s a candid, thoughtful answer, and one that shows she is happy to experiment in order to find the best solutions to questions of gender.

She talks music too, telling us about the “shock to the system” of working with her new producer, Blake Mills. He’s a big name, having produced albums by Alabama Shakes and John Legend and collaborated with the likes of Lana Del Rey as a session musician. Marling suggests that Mills’ instrumental prowess helped her to record the album at least as much as his production chops did, as a desire to match his level of guitar playing led her to practise for much longer (although her performances today retain a folksy, ramshackle style).

“I love America and find America very infuriating for the same reason”

The lyrics to Semper Femina, which was written on the road, are “based in thought” as opposed to the American “landscape” of her previous album, Short Movie, which addressed living in Los Angeles. There is a moment here where politics threatens to enter the conversation as she comments: “I love America and find America very infuriating for the same reason”. But she makes a more personal point as she gushes: “I love [Americans] because they give a lot of value to artists, which is quite nice if you’ve devoted your career, inadvertently in my case, to being an artist.” But she also says that the country “gives a very strange, over the top reverence to people who have lived very self indulgent lives and demand to be called artists”. Despite this duality, she comes to the firm conclusion that “America gave me freedom to express myself” in that it fuelled the recording of a new album. She wryly notes that this was not her intention in moving there, but her cautious answer makes it clear that she is an incredibly self-analytical person.

Similarly, she says that her songs have gradually become more informed by her own experience than by the gothic and romantic literature which coloured her earlier lyrics. In fact, she hasn’t “read any fiction for a while”.  She cites touring solo as one such influence: “[It’s a] big mental and physical exertion, and it can be a little bit scary”. She feels this is particularly true for women: “That innate sense of fear is really quite constricting, and perhaps more of an affliction to women than to men.” It is surprising that an artist who has spent so much time on the road still fears it, and her honesty in sharing this feeling is reflective of the tone of the whole event.

"That innate sense of fear [in touring] is really quite constricting, and perhaps more of an affliction to women than to men."

Her creativity is not limited to music, however. She mentions the pleasure of giving form to her imagination in the video she directed for her song ‘Soothing’, likening it to “lucid dreaming”. She’s happy to take lighter questions too, telling us about cooking vegan food to impress guests and about her favourite song to play live, ‘Rambling Man’. She’s chatty and funny throughout, frequently affecting a baby voice to reflect her internal monologue, but takes the questions seriously and gives considered answers to all of them.

She plays three songs from the new album. Sitting on the front row just a few metres away from Marling, the sense of intimacy is palpable as she strums her guitar before the silent audience. The silence helps to bring out the songs, removing any distraction from her words, which are of such a fine quality that they really do speak for themselves. ‘Wild Fire’ is perhaps the best, a gorgeous, mellow character sketch of a girl who “keeps a pen behind her ear because she’s got something that she really really needs to say”. It’s an apt lyric, because the most important takeaway from this conference is that Laura Marling is continuing to develop artistically and is becoming more and more interesting in her approach. And she still has a lot to say.