(Credits: Far Out / JPBoardman / Alamy)
Sun 7 December 2025 8:00, UK
While I know we don’t want to do it, let me take you back to Covid, a time without gigs, and hence, a time when any record released was treasured all the more.
Because during those days, when all we had were family quiz nights, fad recipes and reruns of old football matches, a sense of connection was desperately needed. Music has always been the greatest facilitator of that, but it never felt as emphatic as it did during the pandemic.
While some artists pulled out from releasing a record, realising that the world couldn’t afford a follow-up tour, many continued on and released their work, knowing that true art can’t abide by marketing timelines. While Fontaines DC’s A Hero’s Death and Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher offered a welcome escape from the pandemic, there was one album that impacted like no other.
Laura Marling’s Song For Our Daughter was the perfect emotional tonic for this time. During my allotted hour of exercise, I would cycle through the park with this album ringing through my ears and begin to embrace the tranquillity of this new dystopian time. Now, five years on, it’s an album that I regularly play as some sort of emotional portal.
It’s songwriting of the truly highest order and outlined Marling’s position as a truly independent and nuanced artist in the contemporary landscape. Listening to Song For Our Daughter, you can quite clearly hear that the songsmith is wholly herself and not a replica of an artist who has come before. But that being said, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a music journalist if I didn’t search for a touchpoint of comparison.
Hence, given my affection for her album, Marling deserves a truly iconic name, befitting of the sort of impact I feel like her music has on the current landscape, and arguably, there’s no bigger name than Joni Mitchell, their music sharing parallels, be it their folk-rooted styles, delicately poised vocal skills or their brutally honest songwriting.
So it’s no surprise that Marling picked two Joni Mitchell songs when WXPN asked her to contribute to their greatest songs of all time list. ‘Car On a Hill’ and ‘A Case of You’ featured on her list, with the latter being one of the most beloved Mitchell songs of all time for having carved out the sort of model for honest songwriting that Marling herself later adopted in her work and set a standard that genuinely few musicians have been capable of since.
“I think men write very dishonestly about breakups,” Mitchell said about the song, before explaining how maturity and emotional intelligence help craft a song as renowned as ‘A Case of You’.
“I wanted to be capable of being responsible for my own errors. If there was friction between me and another person, I wanted to be able to see my participation in it so I could see what could be changed and what could not. That is part of the pursuit of happiness. You have to pull the weeds in your soul when you are young, when they are sprouting, otherwise they will choke you,” she elaborated.
While I am keen to measure Marling and Mitchell in respect of themselves, there’s no doubting that there is a chain of influence. Blue’s honesty makes it a record that impacts its listeners in the exact same way A Song For Our Daughter has for me, and it’s in that shared greatness that these artists exist in the same realms.
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