If Laura Marlings Grammy-nominated standout, Semper Femina, signified a mid-career watershed, her 2020 follow-up, Song for Our Daughter, finds the Londoner moving through a subtler, though equally vital evolution replete with sharpened observations and a gripping sense of vulnerability. Loosely inspired by Maya Angelous 2008 essay collection Letter to My Daughter, the albums ten tracks act as an exquisite outpouring of accumulated wisdom, pain, and the type of detailed personal narratives at which Marling excels. Co-produced with longtime foil Ethan Johns, though bearing a similar instrumental palette to her previous Blake Mills-produced outing, the largely acoustic framework here is neatly woven with spare, elegant instrumentation leaving little to hide behind as she rakes the cooling embers of her own past, engages warily with the present, and imagines possible futures her fictional child might one day face. The rugged folk-rock jangle of Held Down and the buoyant pop paean to individualism Strange Girl deliver some of the more immediate thrills here, but its the marvelous centerpiece Fortune that sets the highest bar. Adorned by a winsome string arrangement and her nimble guitar picking, Marlings opening salvo of you took out that money that your mama had saved, she told me she kept it for running away sets up a multigenerational tale of escape and misfortune that plays like a late-career highlight from a legacy act gazing backward. At just 30 years old and with seven albums to her credit, Marlings songwriting has been honed to a level of literate maturity that few artists achieve in their careers. ~ Timothy Monger

Rovi