Laura Marling’s ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ Perfectly Expresses How Caring Is Scary

Love shouldn’t hurt, is something my mother always tells me. The lead up to that love though, testing the waters, trying to be vulnerable with someone not entirely worth it, is awful. I don’t know why we do it. Love is sometimes falling and breaking apart and feeling that spectral hanging around you afterward—an emotional haunting.

Whenever I thought of love, or at least the idea of love that I had during a certain period of my life, I’d think of Laura Marling’s song “Ghosts,” from her debut record Alas I Cannot Swim. In the first few verses, the British folk singer speaks of a mopey character, a man so heartbroken and grim, carrying around the ghosts of his past loves to his current affection. “Opened up his little heart unlocked the lock that kept it dark/ And read a written warning saying I’m still mourning,” Marling sings over her guitar picking, plucky and terse. She continues, almost jokingly, “lover please do not, fall to your knees/ It’s not, like I believe in/ everlasting love.” The opening track of her near perfect debut sounds like a lecture, a side-eye, by a woman wizened over time to the disappointments that the wrong love, that loving someone and it failing, can sometimes bring.

Alas I Cannot Swim, released ten years ago this week, is like a journal entry; a capsule of a time that, for better or worse—and likely worse—held so many important moments about love and a kind of loss. Vital realizations and revelations, memories, and gifts of youth and growing up. It’s an album of mistakes; of seeing harder truths, tangled complexities where there once was a stunning, plush garden of opportunity. Marling is a force. There is no doubting that. She has provided a necessary body of work full of personal stories, lonesome melodies that no other really has; her songs are searing and evocative, emotional and rapturous. This generation’s Joni Mitchell, some like to yell. Alas I Cannot Swim is a refreshing dialogue, both honest and raw about the realities and complications of forming a connection with another person. Marling shows us that that self-reflection isn’t always going to be pretty—instead it is often showing loneliness, in all its forms, which is far more powerful.

Marling’s praise often comes with adjectives about her wisdom, a sharpness, an almost eerily clairvoyant sense of knowing. When Alas I Cannot Swim was released in February 2008, the singer was 18-years-old and, for some, that’s a miraculous thing; a youth with such depth. She had been living in London since she was 16, dropped out of school to pursue music, living with her then boyfriend at the time and producer of Alas I Cannot Swim, Charlie Fink of Noah and the Whale. She was deeply embedded in the new folk (nu folk?) scene in London that was the base for bands like Noah and the Whale, Emmy the Great, and, of course, Mumford and Sons. Marling’s work can hardly ever be referenced without the addition of the aforementioned male dominated groups, especially the one that would go on to sell millions of records and become a staple at Bonnaroo.

Alas is a seemingly dense debut with 13 songs (one that is hidden and is the masterpiece of the record) that traverses the terrain of love, loss, and ego. The first few songs, such as “Ghosts,” “You’re No God,” and “Tap at My Window,” speak to a tension, a back and forth, between lovers. “Tap at My Window” is the most youthful sounding of all her songs, in the sense that, you can tell she was a teenager when she wrote it, but that doesn’t make it any less profound. “Maybe I’ll write him a story/ and maybe I’ll fall asleep in his arms/ Maybe I’ll wake up lonely and fallen away again,” she sings, contemplative. Later on, more steadily, she sings, “and Mother I blame you with every inch of the being you gave/ For I have become you and I know every part of your game/ And Father I love you, but how can you watch as I push her away/ I cannot forgive you for bringing me up this way.” Immediately it sounds like a teen thing to do, to shift some kind of blame toward one’s parents for failing to connect but it is a rather pointed and honest look at the humanity of our parents. Adults fuck up too and don’t know how to treat each other.

The pinnacle of Alas is the record’s last two songs “Your Only Doll (Dora)” and the title track. Here, there is a songwriting strength that we’d see evolve over her following albums. “Alas I Cannot Swim” is far more jaunty in tune than what preceded it. Where “Your Only Doll (Dora)” is filled with a sorrow—with her sharp, stinging guitar strings— “Alas” is more playful, shimmery, like you’d reach an island soaked in sunlight. It’s still plain and firm about a love or lust that cannot be; a futile connection that cannot occur but still trying to be good with one’s life anyway. It’s more optimistic, in light of the severe criticisms of a more seemingly perfect life (“There is gold across the river but I don’t want none/Gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun”) and capitalism, to an extent (“Saying work more, earn more, live more.”)

On “Your Only Doll (Dora),” Marling broaches sex and sexuality in a way that is honest and not exploitive. “In his bed I am queen, unobtainable me/ Sexual being, human with feelings/ The two are not me/ The two will not be mine,” she sings. She shows a devastating reality: one women are often put through where men believe our emotional capacity in sexual experiences is far more than what it really is or on par with their own cavalierness. Plainly, some don’t men care all that much how we feel, and Marling articulates that to a completely raw point: it’s quite a lonely feeling. It’s gutting as she sings, “you’ve broken your only doll.” Sexuality and love are often two separate conversations, which Marling gestures toward here—conversations that don’t always include respect or care of one’s feelings.

In an interview with The New York Times several years ago, Marling said: “I’m quite private. I wouldn’t be able to get up and play the songs every night if they really jabbed a piece of glass into my eye every night. They are personal. But they’re not confessional.” Which is true. When I interviewed her last year, she was open, and tender about her work, especially what it means to listeners, but shied away from ever blatantly explaining a song’s meaning. It’s a skill few have: to write so clearly about an experience, often about love or heartbreak, but be so removed from it.

Marling’s body of work—ranging from six recorded albums, a podcast about femininity in the creative industry, live albums and more—feels like she’s lived several lifetimes at this point. There is rigor in her work that involves trying to understand people; to dig deeper than the average mind usually can to figure us out, why we love, how we hurt, that makes her seem so filled with wisdoms beyond her years. This has propelled her to have a steady career and a necessary voice in folk and music in general. The songs she writes about love on Alas offer a grainier sense of reality; an internal dialogue about the external things one cannot control, namely another person and their feelings. Teenagers and young adults have a perception that is sharp and we don’t always see that. Marling excelled at her commitment to excavating the experiences she knew then—as someone just forming a version of herself. It’s a self she no longer immediately relates to but it’s foundational.

On “Shine,” Marling sings, “I’m honest now/ not a shouter/ I am reformed, reborn and forgiven/ And you’ve been busy but you’ve missed me.” She’s brazen; a confident creature, in the face of someone else’s urges for her—their expectations of her too—until she’s not, for just a second. And that’s okay. Unraveling the foibles of emotional experience is the foundation of Alas I Cannot Swim. She is the most in-tune with the marriage of creativity and psychology—of ideas about humanity, however fragmented a person is—on her debut. It’s hard to see how anyone would not see her as prolific considering this is where she began.

Sarah MacDonald is also prolific. Follow her on Twitter.