Everybody knows ‘Sophia‘. Never mind if you haven’t heard the song yet; we all know this girl. Everyone who’s ever fallen out of love has met her, hated her, wished terrible wrongs upon her. Laura Marling has found a way to voice those dark, jealous thoughts, to throw the windows open wide and let the light in on them.
The remarkable thing is that she expresses these thoughts with such eloquence. Her deceptively joyful arrangement takes the lion’s share of the credit for this. From the fingerpicking pattern whispers that open ‘Sophia’, to the brisk, impassioned pace at the heart of the song, there’s an odd comfort to how Marling makes it all so understandable.
There’s no melodrama, no swooping strings or solo breaks. An undercurrent of humming cello is the only concession to string accompaniment, and the band show considerable restraint, letting the tune do the work for them. The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby‘ springs to mind, with that same strange combination of compelling character study and strikingly original melody.
So that’s what ‘Sophia’ sounds like, feels like, looks like. Okay, the third one didn’t get a paragraph. Never mind, here’s a smashing music video for the song instead. It’s got the lovely songstress herself and the band in a cathedral, directed by somebody who clearly loves instruments and Laura Marling’s face, as if to make us concentrate on the music somehow. Tricksy director. Works, though.
(Simon Moore)