But in the July of her lost year, for reasons she can't entirely explain, Marling finally decided to start plucking around on her guitar again. She reunited the group of musicians she'd disbanded before her stripped-down fourth album, Once I Was an Eagle, and knocked out her new LP, Short Movie, in just a couple of weeks. Full of hazy drones, expansive string arrangements, and, for the first time, electric guitar work from Marling herself, it's probably her most instrumentally diverse record to date, while still retaining the more ramshackle, "first thought, best thought" approach she'd begun to employ the last time around. Her voice is throaty and self-assured, and the songwriting reveals a wider-angle focus. Unlike her early records, Short Movie largely shuns personal narratives of "chance or circumstance or romance"—to borrow one of her lyrics from Once I Was an Eagle. Instead, she's made her otherworldly storytelling just a little more fractured and a little more vague, focusing her gaze on other people's tales of heartbreak and disaffection rather than just her own. On "How Strange I Love You," she sings about a dedicated husband and father who's just trying to be a good man, taunting, Do you know how hard that is?

The night before our meeting at the hotel bar, as part of a Conor Oberst-headlined show at New York's ornately decorated Beacon Theatre, Marling took the stage solo, her hair newly shorn into a style resembling Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc, fiercely fingerpicking her way through a pair of thundering and severe new songs. Marling has a reputation for reticence, both in conversation and in live performance, but after spending the past year combating an "existential crisis" of sorts, it's as though she's finally developed the real-life confidence to match her headstrong music. "I don't think this will be what I do for the rest of my life," she muses the following day, reflecting on her time away from the spotlight. "But it's not time to give it up. I'm just tasting the sweetest bit of it right now."