Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CDXXII--Laura Marling: All My Rage

One of the gentle reminders I get on occasion when I write my weekly music post is just how many artists I literally know just one song that they have performed, and how there will never be world enough and time (thank you, Andrew Marvell) to listen to every artist and their catalog of music before my time on this world is over.  Such was the case with this week's artist and tune (once again, introduction courtesy of my darling daughter) --as much as I love folk music, I am certain that the songs and albums produced by this week's featured artist would become a litany of good music for me to listen to....

Laura Marling was born in 1990 in the U.K.--her mother was a music teacher and her father ran a recording studio, so she most assuredly had an early start on her career.  At the age of sixteen she graduated from secondary school and moved to London, moving in with her sisters.  She immediately began joining bands, and by the ripe old age of eighteen had released her first album...which promptly was nominated for a Mercury Prize (as were three of her later albums).  She won a Brit Award for Best Female Vocalist at the age of twenty-one, and in 2017 was nominated for a Grammy for best folk album.  Over the course of her fifteen year career Marling has released seven studio albums (six of which have hit the top ten in the U.K.), and two more albums as a member of the band LUMP.  Marling also made a brief foray into acting in 2015, co-starring in a short film called "Woman Driver."

Fun Fact:  As of 2020, Marling was enrolled in a master's program for psychoanalysis...all of which leads me to wonder just what the hell I did with almost sixty-four years of my life....

"All My Rage" was featured on Marling's 2011 album A Creature I Don't KnowIt was not released as a commercial single; the album reached #4 on the U.K. album chart, and #99 here in America.

I couldn't begin to tell you fuck-all what "All My Rage" is about, but I can tell you it sounds like a beautiful Irish folk ballad, the instrumentation is as gorgeous as it gets, and Marling sings like the Gods of Music blessed her vocal cords two times over.  Throw in the harmonies on the second visit to the chorus and Marling's cryptic lyrics and you have yourself a folk song as good as anything this side of American folk in the fifties and sixties.  And she was all of twenty-one when she wrote and recorded it--all of which tells me that music will always be in the very good hands of some talented musician somewhere.

Lyric Sheet:  "Cover me up I'm pale as night/With a mind so dark and skin so white/Is this the devil having fun?/I tip my cap to the raging sun..."

Enjoy:





Republicans = Nazis

Peace,
emaycee

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