Song for Our Daughter, the title of the British singer-songwriter Laura Marling's 2020 album, was a shrewd prediction. Marling gave birth to a daughter in 2023, and her recently released eighth album, Patterns in Repeat, is a meditation on early motherhood and the transition to a slower, richer stage of life. The album, recorded in Marling's home, is the most raw of her works, occasionally incorporating specific reminders of her domestic life: a muffled conversation between Marling and her partner, the cooing of their baby.
With its dreamy, scaled-back production, the album ends up presenting an understated pronatalism—a rare work of contemporary art that portrays motherhood in an almost exclusively positive light without being explicitly right-wing. "I want you to know that I gave it up willingly," Marling sings to her daughter, "Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me."
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