A few years ago, Laura Marling got lost. Living in Los Angeles – where she’d moved as an independence-seeking 21-year-old – she took a hiatus from the music-making that had earned her three Top 10 albums and stacks of songwriter-of-her-generation style plaudits, and reinvented herself as a yoga instructor. Not being particularly well known in the US, this career change left her wholly incognito. “I had no identity. It was really, really, really difficult,” she says. “I was socially bankrupt.”

Not only was she stripped of her status, but a bout of depression had left her bereft in other ways. It was a “very null time”, she says. “I didn’t feel like I had a gender in a weird way – I’d lost a lot of weight so I didn’t really have any feminine features.” She shaved her head and “looked like a young boy. It was quite a good experience of being a non-sexual presence in the world, like a eunuch.” The cherry on top of this cake of devastating self-negation? She wasn’t even very good at teaching yoga. “You need to know a lot more than I know to do it well,” she admits.

Today, Marling’s former identity as songwriter-of-her-generation is fully restored; the 27-year-old is back doing what she does better than almost anyone else. Her new album of folk-inflected rock is her most direct and accessible in years. Fuelled by gorgeous vocals, hypnotic fingerpicking and singalong melodies, Semper Femina is what one might categorise as “classic” singer-songwriter fare in the lineage of Neil Young, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.



What is different about Semper Femina is its vantage point. The lyrics were largely informed by that period in LA and the new relationships she formed there. One, a friendship with a girl called Nouel, became the inspiration for the song of the same name. In it, Marling admires Nouel as she lies sprawled on the bed like the Origine du Monde – Gustave Courbet’s explicit 1866 painting of a woman’s genitalia. This suggestive gaze penetrates the record, with Marling desiring, idealising and pining for women in the vein of a traditional male troubadour.



“Everything’s about sex, I believe,” says Marling, sitting on a sofa in a homely Hackney recording studio and explaining why she decided to write about her friend’s vulva. “This idea there’s a very finite difference between sexual and romantic love and friendship is crazy,” she says. “I think you fall in love with friends.” Yet she feels relationships between women have “either been ignored or commodified, or sexualised. So I wanted to give a different perspective on that.”



Notably, the record’s tendency to look at women – lingeringly, lovingly – extended to Marling herself. “I think probably a big part of this album was me needing to love myself, which is a bit cringe to say.” Indeed, Nouel sees Marling’s gaze refracted back towards herself. The album’s title, which roughly translates to “always woman”, is an abbreviation of a line from Virgil: “varium et mutabile semper femina” – woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing. In the song, Marling applies the epithet to both her and Nouel, in a luxuriant whirl of feminine connection and reflection.



Marling originally decided to embark on a career in music to “prove a point – that I could if I wanted to. I was sick of people trying to take my guitar away from me even though I was good.” Yet even after years of prodigious success – record contract at 16, a formidable back catalogue by her mid-20s – her instrument still gets prised out of her hands, with helpful colleagues telling Marling not to “worry about playing the guitar, I’ll play the guitar”.

Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Such experiences led her to create a podcast, Reversal of the Muse, on which she quizzes musicians from Shura to Dolly Parton about their experiences in a male-dominated industry. As well as revealing everyday sexism, it allows Marling to catalogue her own complex reactions to it, from the way protesting against the guitar-snatching makes her sound like an “ungrateful bitch” to the pleasure of being, if not objectified, then at least admired. “The reality of being a woman is being a human, but also slightly enjoying the gaze,” she says.

One gaze Marling feels no ambivalence towards, however, is that of the camera. “I think I’m pretty, but I fucking hate having my photo taken,” she explains. “On this album campaign, I was like fine, I’ll do a private photoshoot, and I’ll get 10 images and give them to all the papers and that’s all. And then every paper wants their own picture and they threaten you with ‘We won’t cover you if you don’t’, and that’s crazy. I’ve got much more important things to do than have my photograph taken.”



In an industry where Instagram accounts, clothing lines and flamboyant pregnancy announcement pictures seem as much a part of an artist’s oeuvre as their music, Marling’s rejection of the image-hungry zeitgeist feels palliative. As does, in a world of ear-splittingly abrasive production and knowing popstar posturing, her preoccupation with the acoustic guitar and the introspective mood it facilitates. Marling describes herself as an introvert. “I think it’s why I don’t relate to a lot of extroverted music, most of what’s in the charts,” she says. “Because a lot of my experience on the planet is in my brain. Maybe I’m lacking in experience and rich in thought, which is not necessarily useful.”

In fact, introversion has, to an extent, characterised Marling’s career, informing both her precocity and the interior deep dives of her lyrics. She began to feel it at 14, when she observed a gulf opening between herself and her peers. “I mean, I had friends, I was a nice guy,” she says. “But I was just not into stuff they were into – getting dressed up and going to clubs. I like to be in bed early. And I got my strength in solitude, I found public events and parties very draining. And I still wish I wasn’t like that because I feel quite boring.”

The discomfort triggered by being part of a crowd ended up mutating into a powerful drive. Marling originally came to prominence as part of a collective of London acoustic types including Mumford and Sons and Noah and the Whale referred to as “nu-folk” in the mid-00s. But being part of a scene was something she hated. “I began to find playing with everybody all the time made everything a bit homogenised,” she says. “So I wanted to branch out. I felt my music was going to become like everyone else’s music, and I wanted to keep it special to me. I couldn’t deal with being in a gang because I had a big ego. I wanted to be considered unique.”

• Semper Femina is released on More Alarming Records on 10 March. Laura Marling tours the UK from 8-18 March.