Song For Our Daughter is a loose concept album about Laura Marling's imaginary child. Its title track is a cautionary tale where the singer offers advice to a young woman making her way in this world. Marling told the BBC it's based on stories she's heard from "every single female friend, and a fair few male friends too."
Marling wrote the song around the time of the 2012 shooting of African American teenager Trayvon Martin. She told Apple Music: "All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that's nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I [was thinking about the] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them."
Another influence is the Roman legend of Lucretia, a beautiful and virtuous noblewoman who was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, an Etruscan king's son. Lately I've been thinking 'bout our daughter growing old All of the bulls--t that she might be told. There's blood on the floor Maybe now you'll believe her for sure "She was raped the night before her wedding," Marling explained to The Independent, "and no one believed her. In that time, they believed if you'd been 'sullied' in any way, if your virginity had been taken before you were married, that your blood would be black. So she walked into court on the morning of her marriage and she stabbed herself in the chest, and her blood was indeed black. And she died. It's an extraordinarily significant comment that was being made all those years ago."
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