One recent afternoon, a Laura Marling song was playing at the Uncommons, a coffee-and-board-game parlor in Greenwich Village. That’s not surprising: the Uncommons is the kind of laid-back, N.Y.U.-student-heavy place where you’d expect to hear a song by the twenty-five-year-old British singer-songwriter, a folkie who, with her new album, “Short Movie,” has turned her hand to rock. But it was unusual to have Laura Marling walk into the café a few minutes later.
“Wicked!” she said, when she heard that her song had just been on. The night before, backed by her band, she’d performed some tracks from the new record, along with favorites like “Take the Night Off,” at a sold-out show in Greenpoint. She was staying with friends in Park Slope for a few days before returning to London. (She has had a horror of New York hotels ever since she stayed in one that rented her room out by the hour. “People were literally having sex in my bed when I was out,” she said.) It was too early to play chess at the Zinc Bar, a favorite spot, so she stopped at the Uncommons and perused a big wall of games that were available to rent.
“This is exactly what I feel like doing,” Marling said, grabbing Super Big Boggle from the wall. “I do think that board games are a great way of gauging someone’s personality,” she declared, setting up the grid. Marling has very pale skin, and her formerly long blond hair has been cut Twiggy short. “Because you can’t really fake it,” she added. “If you’re pretending you’re not interested in winning, it’s very fucking obvious.”
Super Big Boggle has six letters across, rather than the usual four. “So you have to make four-letter words, no threes, O.K.?” Marling said. “Three-minute rounds. I’m getting my timer out!”
Round One: Marling scored with “glut,” “lust,” “stud,” and “bust,” and had a two-point word with “dairy,” crushing her opponent, fourteen to six.
“Short Movie” is the result of what Marling called “my jaunt,” a two-year experiment in being a “professional vagabond,” mainly in Los Angeles, camping up and down the West Coast. She started singing full time in a band at sixteen. Music had never been the plan, exactly; it just happened. Her first solo album, “Alas, I Cannot Swim,” released when she was eighteen, was nominated for Britain’s Mercury prize, as were two albums that followed. Then came her identity crisis: “I realized, these past two years, how common that is, because I met a lot of people my age who weren’t sure about what they were going to do.”
Round Two was closer, but Marling won again (“hiss,” “home,” “wash,” “sash”), six points to five.
In L.A., she played no music for eight months. “It was kind of tortuous but kind of good not to have an identity in a town that exists purely on identity,” she said. She read—Whitman, Rilke, Yeats, Gurdjieff. “I was discovering a lot, but it wasn’t a communal experience, which touring is and music is.”
Before Marling left London, her father, a former session guitarist and recording-studio owner named Sir Charles William Somerset Marling—he is also a baronet—gave her a Gibson ES-335 guitar, her first electric, and that’s what she wrote the new album with. “It was a different relationship with an instrument,” she said. “Acoustic guitars are quite feminine. You feel them resonate in your chest. This guitar is very heavy, very masculine, with a giant metal rod right through it. And I had an amp whose reverb was permanently stuck on full.”
In the final Boggle round, Marling’s opponent managed to stave off humiliation to win, eleven points to six, but Marling had taken the match. She was very obviously pleased. ♦
