Armed with only her voice and a nylon-string acoustic guitar, London folk singer Laura Marling was probably the busiest musician in Philadelphia this past Friday. The 21-year-old played three solo sets in the city, beginning with an XPN Free At Noon performance at World Cafe Live and ending with two sold-out sets later that night at Grindcore House. about 60 people sat on the floor in the back room for the 7 p.m. set at Grindcore, a vegan coffee shop in South Philly. “I hope your bottoms are still intact,” she said at the conclusion of her eight-song set. We scanned the space after everyone cleared out between shows, and it didn’t look like anyone left without a bottom. but they certainly left with something else: a rare and informal glimpse at the work of a talented young songwriter.
While touring in support of A Creature I Don’t Know, out earlier this year, Marling has performed at venues at least 10 times the size of Grindcore. but with its overfilled bookshelves, paintings and sketches on the walls, vintage sofa, and wonderfully cozy vibe, Grindcore was the perfect venue for her intimate and pained songwriting. This is the kind of space you’d expect her to perform in five years ago, when a 16-year-old Marling was making her first moves on the London nu-folk scene. After three very well-received full-length albums, many Joni Mitchell and Fiona Apple comparisons, a handful of tours, and a few notable awards (“best Female Solo Artist” by the Brit Awards and “best Solo Artist” by NME, both in 2011), a tiny show in a coffee shop was an unexpected treat, and definitely a diehard fan’s dream come true.
Marling has a deep fascination with objects. Opening with “Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)” from I Speak Because I Can, the song was as much an ode to everyday objects as it was to the city and the lover who have vanished. Jackets, coats, scarves, and books are all equally important characters, inseparable from the wounded humans who walk the snow-covered streets of London alone. “And I’m clearing all the crap out of my room / trying desperately to figure out what it is that makes me blue,” she sang. The objects in Marling’s songs are never simply objects, but rather integral parts of her own tragic world. Representing the past, they haunt her just as much as lost lovers, and so they must be discarded when it’s time for her to create a new world.
But Marling never seems to build a new world with new love and new objects. She only wrestles with the past, and so there wasn’t much, if any, outright joy to be found in her 35-minute set. On “Alpha Shallows,” it was the objects owned by London’s upper class that bummed her out: “We walk up Holland Avenue and watch the rich as they consume / their products made our hearts exude, emptiness unrivaled.” On new song “Night After Night,” a woman with an ever-weakening body and a man “weeps in the evening and lies naked and prays” as they both deteriorate. Brutal stuff for a Friday night, right?
Her songs were terribly sad and extremely personal, but Marling somehow managed to keep the mood upbeat, and the audience from plummeting into suicidal depression. “I’ll talk you through the tunings,” she said at the outset, and she kept her promise. While transitioning between multiple open-chord tunings between songs, she mentioned she thought she was going to die recently in Chicago. “I lost my shit big time,” she said about being trapped in a stalled hotel elevator. “In my head, we were already dead,” she continued. People laughed. The same thing happened when she was traveling through an Ontario blizzard on the current tour. “I lost my shit again,” she confessed. People laughed, again. even though even the banter referenced the possibility of death, it helped lighten up the crowd’s mood.
She closed with “Sophia,” a stand-out song from A Creature. Her careful, quasi-flamenco finger-picking evolved into a beautiful, delicate chorus in which the distinction between human characters and objects finally dissolved completely. “I’m wounded by dust,” she sang, referring to a stagnating human in the same way one might refer to a clock, a book, or a chair sitting in a desolate room. but by its conclusion, the song had evolved into a celebratory, Led Zeppelin-esque stomp—a powerful declaration in which frailty was elevated, weakness sublimated into strength. The audience members bobbed their heads and swayed along with Marling, smilingly shaking off much of the dust they’d been collecting down there on the floor.