It’s always a little disconcerting to come across someone, a performer or artist, that is well on their way to a brilliant career yet remains completely off your own radar. That’s how I felt the other day when I saw a segment on the CBS Sunday Morning show, where a reporter, Bill Flanagan, was talking about music to give this holiday season. He talked about the new box sets from the big names then he talked for a brief moment about a 21 year-old British singer/songwriter named Laura Marling who he said, “ Is not only wiser than her years – she’s wiser than MY years.”
He also said that older listeners would hear echoes of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and that young listeners would hear the voice of a new generation coming into its own.
Pretty high praise. I decided I had better check out this person.
Wow.
I was knocked out. There were tons of videos out there and going through several, I couldn’t find one that wasn’t verging on brilliant from this very young looking girl with a sad, detached blankness on her face. You could hear traces of the artists he mentioned in the easy phrasing of her lovely voice which made it somewhat familiar but there was indeed something new in her synthesis of what she had absorbed in her very young life. Something well beyond her years. It was all just wonderful, even the music from her earliest album released just days after she turned 18. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t stumbled across a talent this big before now.
But thankfully, I have. As I said, there is a great number of her songs out there online and I have yet to find a clunker. Here’s a newer song called Sophia. I was captured by the line from its chorus–… I am wounded by dust…
Redtree Times 