There is so much I could say about Dolly, much of which is obvious and unanimous. What I hadn’t dwelt on much before was her maternal femininity — other aspects of her femininity being, of course, quite self-evident.

Watching her age and continue to embody that stable, familiar character of love, wit, and charm, but also strength in gentleness, it occurs to me that she is the perfect mother. In the same way that Maria Von Trapp is the perfect mother - a mother one step removed, without the physical, hormonal and psychological implications of having given birth or the tired, nerve-worn years of sleep deprivation.

In the well-established trope of the wicked stepmother, the avoidance of these sacrifices is evidence of selfishness, but I hadn’t really noticed (or named) before its contrary: the Infallible Mother; The mother who, unable to sacrifice in a literal bodily sense, is alchemically transformed into goodness and love, a mother whose capacity is seemingly boundless, almost holy. Miss Honey, Maria, Dolly…It’s a more recurrent archetype than I realised, and such a crucial one. A mother to all, The Dollai Mama. And with all the incredible things she did with her money and her tireless, skilful redirection of animosity, forever converting shit questions into golden answers, she was the best possible embodiment of this archetype.

Here again is my cover of Do I Ever Cross Your Mind (posted once before):

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A few years into mine and GJ’s relationship, we decided it was time for us to take an adult holiday - by adult I mean grown-up rather than…anything else that might mean.

We chose Greece, for no reason in particular. Ten days of guaranteed sunshine near water. Simple. You’d think. We aaagonised over where to stay – how to get there, what car to rent, whether we could walk to a restaurant, who to invite to come join us for a few days. It’s when I first learnt that GJ was a maximalist thinker, meaning he has to explore Every. Single. Option. To. Its. Full. Potential. And I, in spectacular contrast, am a minimalist thinker, meaning “this seems fine”. It means his computer has fifty tabs open, and though I am sitting in front of mine, it has run out of battery. As he went about furiously opening tabs like a rushing gene mutation, it dawned on me that this opposition between us could only have shown itself in this way. For the entirety of our relationship up to this point, he had managed his life, and I had managed mine. Our administrative necessities had never overlapped. He moved into my flat because I wanted to live there; he cooked our food because he wanted to eat that. Now, of course, two children down, we live almost entirely in a state of administrative co-operation. And as the countdown begins to our first child starting school next year, as yet unsure as to where we will live, the tabs are off the scale.

Shortly after this trip to Greece, appalled by the excess of admin, the excruciating negotiation of thought processes required for GJ and I to conjure a shared vision, let alone the astonishing cost of the thing, I began the annual practice of writing my parents a thank-you note for all the holidays we went on as children: The simplicity, the peace, the good company they always orchestrated for us – we were nearly always joined by at least one other family with children of companionable age. We usually took a villa in France or Italy, inland somewhere, with a swimming pool. One of my most vivid memories of childhood holidays is my father lying on the ground in France, my cousin Lara and I resting our heads on his chest and staring up at the night sky, ablaze with stars, serenaded by a hymn of evening crickets, trying to spot satellites. It was simple, few excursions, maybe one meal at a restaurant.

My notes, since becoming a parent, now include the acknowledgement that for most of the 25 years that they were joined by their children (my sisters being six and eight years older than me) on holiday, the whole affair was presumably closer to an exercise in self-sacrifice than an opportunity to recalibrate. From keeping us from falling in the pool as children to picking us up from bars in town as teenagers – we hadn’t the faintest fucking clue how lucky we were.

But what really, really blows my mind is that they organised all those trips without the internet. No psychotic number of tabs open. No ridiculous micro-investigations of the square mile surrounding the potential destination. No reading Google reviews of the local restaurant or wild swimming spot. No price comparison for car rental. No exhaustive list of flight times. Long drives without screens or gps. And perhaps most importantly, no airbnb. I refuse to capitalise the name of this wicked institution. I despise airbnb. I curse its hideous nomenclature and all the IKEA-clad, spot-lit, blunt-knifed, unlived in wretchedness it has brought upon the world.

When I first began using the platform to book myself outhouses to stay in after shows in towns and cities across America, it hadn’t yet transformed into its terrible final form. These were places generally run by people who liked the idea of providing a traveller’s rest and perhaps enjoyed the slightly exhibitionist feeling of exposing the eclectic interiors they had cultivated over time. I never feared a review, giving or receiving, because our expectations of each other were matched – we agreed that I would be paying them money to intrude on their space, they were to be hospitable, and I was to be gracious. I loved experiencing the broad range of taste which each town represented: a tiny little cabin in the woods on the edge of Nevada City with cast iron pans and a crocheted bedspread; an incredible four-poster bed in the room I rented in an old lady’s lavishly furnished Victorian mansion in Louisville, intricate lace doilies on every surface; the artist’s studio in Brooklyn which sat atop a fire station, one room containing a half finished canvas and an entire wall dedicated to the storage of their essential oils – that’s how much faith was once placed in the exchange.

The problem with airbnb was built in to its structure – a review system that eventually broke the hearts and souls of any space with a heart and soul, leaving a void which was swiftly filled by the very worst kind of late capitalism; The same kind that gave us cheap air travel and means you can barely ever hail a cab. We swapped something dignified for something mortified. Something that was a treat into something that is a threat. They all told us we deserved more of these leisures in our life and in the process drained them of all possible leaisurable experience. It was all a giant bait and switch. I deleted uber years ago, I don’t fly if i can help it and given how much flying I have done for my work and how many guitars I travel with, I refuse to put myself through the indignity of low cost airlines. And I have now finally closed the door on airbnb. The holiday from which we recently returned was the final nail in the coffin. I nearly went out with a bang, briefly hovering a finger over the publish button of one of my finest artist achievements: an honest review of my experience and a colourful takedown of the platform as a whole. As with so many grievances, simply writing down was sufficient enough of an exorcism, and so I bravely stood down.

The experience got me thinking about how much nostalgia is woven into the expectation one places on that precious two weeks of the summer – especially now, as a family. When I was growing up, as for most, it was the only two weeks of the year we were all together as a family. We each took our leisure: My dad would walk off into the countryside with his watercolouring back pack and pick his spot he would return to paint every day; my sisters would choose there spot by the pool and stack of books to read and cds to listen to. When I was younger my principal activity would be choosing the animal or insect I intended to stalk obsesively. My happiest memories though are condensed into the years in which I briefly drifted into an age bracket in which I could be accommodated into the world my sisters and their friends occupied; a period of maybe two or three years, before they ceased joining us on holiday. In those years my friends and their friends integrated and days spent laughing by the pool turned into evenings spent drinking cheap wine, smoking and being permitted to get up to mischieve right under the nose of our parents. It was tame, as I’m sure is obvious, but it was meaningful – all these worlds, that usually passed each other by in their usual orbit on there routes around the sun of family life, aligned there on those warm evenings in the tuscan countryside. My father and his friends passing guitars around, my mother and god mother roaring with laughter, my sisters and their friends talking to me like I was one of them.

This was a different time – I hate to spell it out, but a world before phones. A time where most of the people you grew up with could afford to buy a house and start a family and go on a european holiday once a year. All the nostalgia brought on by this intense reminiscing about family holidays got me wondering what leisure really means now. Part of what irks me about airbnb is that your tie to your technology is baked into the experience. I spent the two weeks mostly terrified of getting a bad review and pitifully aquiscing to our insane hosts requests to intrude on our holiday for one reason or other. All I want is to pay someone a reasonable amount of money for a semi-shithole house I’m not afraid of scratching, filled with books, one vhs of The Sound of Music, some nice wine, a pool, a view and for everyone else to fuck off so I can be with my family.

What I realise now, is this is what I want from life. I don’t want it for two weeks of the year. Part of my concern about the future of living in London is that even if I was significantly richer than I am now, I could still not afford a house in which a could comfortabley have my family to stay. And that’s all I want. Really, that’s all I want.

Howdy -

Carrying on a theme from last week's post, another formative love interest of many a childhood was, of course, Disney’s Robin Hood, a literal fox.

Not enough people are aware of this alternate version of “Love” from the extended soundtrack, which features unused recordings for the film.

And here, Peter Ustinov freestyling in character - “here in NottingHAAAYIYAMM:

And here’s my cover of Love:

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Captain von Trapp, played by the unbeeeeeelievably smokin’ hot Christopher Plummer, was actually voiced in the songs by Bill Lee, an equally vocally smokin’ hot “playback singer” who depped in lots of parts in various Disney musicals. Fun fact.

In next week's On Leaving London, I’ll be thinking about the shape and form of the summer holiday - and how the space set aside for leisure away from the city is more now than ever a factor in choosing how and where to live.

For now, here’s my version of Edelweiss - sung in a slightly vulnerable key for my range, but I kinda like it:

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In the 1980’s when my parents moved to that house from their flat in London, perhaps this inscription felt in keeping with the quiet parade of cottages, thriving pub with ancient beams you had to duck under to get to the bar, and village shop manned by whatever go-getting teenager came of age that year. Maybe it was the inscription, perhaps it was the year we got Sense and Sensibility on VHS, maybe it was Kate Winslet yomping across a verdant pasture not all that dissimilar to the one beyond the end of our garden, that led me to believe that I was growing up in the great British countryside.

It wasn’t till I was a young teenager that I was overheard at a birthday lunch, by some snobby relative describing myself as living in the country, that I was set straight - she snorted through bucked teeth, interrupting to correct me “Rural suburbia, darling”. For any readers in America interested in the British class system, here is a shining example of a vanity of small differences that cumulatively compose the great farcical bouquet of the British middle classes. With one comment she had torn away my childish regalia - look, she seemed to say, it’s plastic! Garbage! Our family, like our home, hung between two worlds, surrounded by either the established or the aspirational. I didn’t feel we belonged to either of them.

I suppose I thought of the countryside as a place where you could get lost in the woods tracking a deer, or see snakes eating frogs, or lie on your back in a grass meadow at sunset and watch the swallows as they abstracted themselves against a violet sky, all of which was possible where I grew up. But it seems I had missed some subtle societal clues - like the fact that our nearest station had a fast train to London for the herds of suited commuters, or that one village led right to another, with barely an agriculturally functioning field between them. Any gap in the landscape would be filled over the coming 25 years with more houses, new towns, in fact, on both sides of our village. You were far more likely to encounter lorries than tractors on the narrow lanes that now strained to contain their load.

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By the time I was 30, the “Welcome to Jane Austen Country” sign seemed almost sarcastic - obscured as it was by near-constant traffic. The road where, as a child, I had walked out alone to stroll down to the nearby ford or buy a 20p surprise bag from the village shop, is now a roaring intersection between two major motorways which connect the west country with London. What’s more, in the last few years there has been an explosion in the Red Kite population, a native bird of prey hunted to near extinction in the 1800’s and virtually unheard of in the 90’s. When I return with my own children to the pine forest playground where I spent much of my youth, the grand scale of the Kite’s mewing and screeching from above casts the scene in an aura more reminiscent of Lynchian America than my own blackbird and starling serenaded infancy. These changes gave visiting my childhood home a sombre and incongruous feeling, change and the passage of time so vast and consuming it seemed to distort and disquiet the bucolic fantasies of my youth. How could I have ever believed I was a child of the British wilderness?

The village shop closed ten years ago, the pub is limping on though with ever more desperate signage outside “Hot Lunch!” “Under new Management!!” “Come one in!!!”. Yet my family home is unchanged. Its position, ten minutes off the M3 meant my parents did and still do get many regular visitors from London, though increasingly they opt not to stay the night because of the noise from the road. The house, lined at every inch with books, with its unique wall of panelled glass which faces the garden and lights the seventies style sunken living room with its fireplace, open and spacious, and high barn ceiling, ruined me for other houses - it has formed the blueprint in my mind of the architecturally perfect family home. So many happy congregations took place in this perfectly sized entertaining space. So many games of racing demon, so many books read by the fire, Christmas presents opened and new years toasted, new boyfriends welcomed and old friends caught up with. We sisters have at times begged them to move, to get further away from the road and enjoy some peace and quiet - but they can’t imagine leaving, and how can we blame them? So much of our home was the people who graced it with their presence, many of whom have now passed, but for the echoes of them that remain in that room. And now that we are all squeezed into tiny spaces in London, it’s still the only place we can all be together, and now the voices of our own children ring out there.

I often wonder how much the shape and form of my family home affects the shape and form of my inner world. I often dream within a twisted version of the architecture of that house; stairs that lead nowhere; endless corridors; overly still and silent rooms. Is this a two-way relationship? Had I had a different childhood home would my unconscious have contorted itself down alternative stairways and corridors, thus yielding different results?

A few years after moving to London and yet still attempting to be the type of thing that yomped across fields, twisting ankles and meeting more Willoughby’s then I’d have liked, I gave up the fantasy of being a child of the country and made absolutely firm my resolution that I would never return to live in Rural Suburbia. And for a long time, I never questioned my future in London, pleasantly punctuating city life with visits to the (slowly dwindling) sanctuary of my parents’ house and garden, drenched now though it was in the auditory backdrop of traffic and birds of prey.

I’m horrified to admit that after our most recent visit, my mind wandered towards imagining what a life out here in the burbs would feel like. Space, a garden, grandparents nearby… there’s decent coffee now, a good bakery even; increasingly, I see handsome couples with young children about. But this is how it happens, isn’t it? Expelled from the city, purgatory welcomes you with its feel of infinity, with a consoling suggestion that it was inevitable, because who has the time or strength for an alternate solution? I remember going to see the play Love Love Love as a teenager about two carefree young things who meet in the swinging 60’s in London, fall in love and have children - the second act takes place in their dull suburban living room 20 years later. During an argument in which the husband is making the case that their lives have become tiresome and unadventurous, the man says “I mean for Christ’s sake, how did we end up living in a suburb of READING!!??”. My sisters and I glanced down the aisle to our parents, who looked on, unmoved, blinking.

How much sharper is it than a serpent’s tooth is it to have an ungrateful child! as my father used to say, a slightly misremembered line from King Lear. For were they not faced with the very same prospect with which I am now reckoning? What life do we want for our children and can we offer it to them here? Indeed, many of my peers are the same. The city in which we invested so much of our young adulthood has forced us further and further out to the edges of cosmopolitan life - the libraries, the galleries, the cultural events that we thought would form the spine of how we raised our children are full to the brim and miles away. Perhaps most crucially, any friends that do remain in the city live so far away and are so consumed, as we are, with work and raising children that we barely ever see them. In this way the choice is different to that which some boomers may have made - the London I knew and aspired to be part of when I was young seems far away, even as I am living it.

Have any of you faced this question? Where did you go!??

Her home on a terraced street not far from the station had a familiar smell of what I thought of as London house, though was quite possibly unique to this area of West London, where I had frequently visited cousins while growing up. It was Egyptian musk, or some sophisticated blend of aromatic oils, combined with wood and dust. Shepherd’s Bush market, where as a child I bought bindis and knock off Baby-G watches (which on closer inspection were actually inscribed “Boby-G”), had the same smell, though with the addition of warm plastic and dried fish water.

Phoebe’s mother, tall and glamorous, worked long hours, so often we opened the door to an empty house. Silence hung from the door to the kitchen, stretched across a family home, waiting to be reanimated. Occasionally, though, you’d traverse the dark, narrow corridor, like so many London terraces, squeezing past shoes and coats and bikes, every inch of wall draped in mismatched paintings and ad hoc organisational solutions, to find her mother sat elegantly on the sofa in the open-plan kitchen. Dressed in long flowing robes, a glossy mass of black hair tied with a chopstick atop her head, tortoise-shell glasses framing her feline eyes, cigarette in hand, some enormous tome or other held up to her gaze so as not to contort herself unflatteringly – to me, the house and its matriarch were sophistication incarnate.

She didn’t cook or drink alcohol. She possessed things we coveted intensely, like a collection of designer handbags and dresses, and silver bottles of foundation, which could at the time only be purchased at duty-free, at eye-watering expense, which she used daily, as if it were a human right – a utility. But otherwise the trappings were typical of middle-class London living: a mix of inherited paintings and furniture designed for a house of greater proportions, setting them at odds with more practical and appropriate pieces; A thumb tack board with faded photos of young children on holiday, rosettes and cards marking various occasions; Numerous points of accumulation atop surfaces, trinkets, ashtrays, plastic gizmos of all kinds; Thousands of books and a front room which nobody used. All London terraces are cursed by this front room - you often see people awkwardly open up the front and back drawing rooms of a London terrace after renovation, but the problem of their size and aspect can’t be solved so easily, it’s one of the reasons these types of houses never felt like home to me, though I have lived in many variants of them over the years. I’ve always struggled to imagine what a family home would feel like in London, for me.

Shepherd’s Bush would eventually become home for my late teens and the place where I began my compulsive daily walk to Notting Hill and back, which lasted a few years, across the wretched green and grand Holland Park Avenue, taking in along the way the many a varied existences it was possible to have in a great city. It was the backdrop against which I wrote my second album, I Speak Becuase I Can. It feels like a lifetime ago. Indeed, each part of town in which I have lived, each place that has housed me has been memorialised in my songwriting, of course.

I’m currently reckoning the prospect of leaving London - exactly 20 years after I first arrived. I feel very confused by this and have been reflecting on what it has meant to me to be here, how it has shaped me, what I wanted, what I thought it would be. How this has all changed. And so I’ll be writing a bit about it here. On Leaving London will be my new recurring series on Substack.

I’ll also continue doing covers - this is a song I remember listening to almost compulsively when I was first spending time in Shepherds Bush. 15, iPod, wired headphones, freshly in love with my first proper boyfriend…

My take on Secret Heart by Ron Sexsmith:

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I am so grateful to Raffi and his beautiful catalogue of work - this year is the 50th anniversary of Singable Songs for the Very Young - long may it continue to b…

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It feels like a ‘given’ song - drawn down from the gods. And, indeed, on doing a little research into how Lennon came to write it, that seems to be the case.

In other news, I’ve been busy constructing characters to accompany my imminent transition into ‘children’s entertainer in crisis’ - evidenced below (photo: Tamsin Topolski)

Laura Sings Raffi is coming to streamers in June

Here’s my take on Across The Universe ft my v loud 8-month-old son:

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If you’re not already aware of this Oscar-worthy clip from 90’s morning television, let it serve as a reminder that, in an age in which musicians are held at the neck by the clammy hand of social media promotion, indiscriminately folded into the sinister conglomerate of “content creation”, we may be missing out on some of the most supremely gifted artists of this generation.

Regard, how this room full of pretty people, perfectly willing to participate in the low vibrational farce on which this show was supposed to rest, allow the awesome force of Smith’s sincerity to re-awaken each and every one of them. Apart from the unbelievably hot woman sitting next to him, who knew it already.

And here is a cover of my favourite songs of his, Twilight

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I spoke with String Arranger to the Stars, Rob Moose, over the easter weekend. He was with his family at their cabin off the coast of Washington State for spring break, I was at the countryside house of a mutual friend of ours, trying to avoid socialising by calling from a field. The result was some pretty shaky phone signal, meaning that this conversat…

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And here’s the song:

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As many of you will know, this is a song that didn’t make it onto Blood On The Tracks, presumably because it’s the exact same chords and feel as Shelter From The Storm.

I remember listening to this in my car at dusk, driving back from Joshua Tree and being completely transported - it reminded me of visiting the church where Dylan got married in Bearsville and feeling as though I was on the inside, the time and place of the America he described, with all its terrible and inspiring juxtopositions. The frightening, “awful truth of how sweet love can be”.

I’ve read two books in the last few weeks - as I requested a few weeks ago, lighthearted, easy-going ones (thank you so much for your recommendations):

Waiting for Birdy (Catherine Newman) - about the expecting and arrival of a second child. Very comforting - genuinely funny

Priestdaddy (Patricia Lockwood) - how did I miss this? Only really discovered her recently on the LRB podcast discussing Wuthering Heights, and then was given this book by a friend. It’s a perfect memoir. True laugh out loud.

Plus listened to Donna Tart reading The Secret History - her speaking voice is aboslutely incredible. Also, she and Lilith from Frasier are my style icons.

Here’s my version of Up To Me:

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I’ve been moving house this week. Yikes, that’s some stressful bullshit. We have moved, only temporarily, to a friend's vacant house in a much hipper and busier part of London than we’re used to, while we give ourselves some time to figure out whether we’ll stay in London or not…

It’s got me reminiscing about the many versions of London I have experienced and how they influenced my writing: living behind Chandler's Guitar shop in Kew with my boyfriend when I was 17 and recording Alas I Cannot Swim. Wandering around Shepherds Bush Green at night at 19 (don’t recommend). My tiny, perfect top-floor flat in Holland Park by the Olympia train line, where I briefly got into smoking weed and wearing Victorian white linen night gowns and people watching from my perfect tiny kitchen window (where I wrote Once I Was An Eagle). And then Columbia Road, right by the flower market. While living there I would walk most days all the way into town, over an hour’s walk and back, just to get coffee and go to record shops. It was around this time, collecting records from 1969, that I really discovered Townes Van Zandt.

I never really wrote much while I was living in that house, nor did I ever have sex in it. Despite its chic location, there was something unsexy about that place. And I think about the barren feeling of that house quite often these days as we try to imagine where we might live next - crazy as it may sound. I do believe that your environment should hold constructive energy for you. I see many gorgeous interiors in magazines like House and Garden which scream “affluence” but also “sexlessness” to me. Aaaany way, thems my thoughts.

My mother turned 80 last week, and we had a little party in her honour. As I was leaving, a family friend came up to say goodbye, a beautiful Polish woman, a very talented painter with grown-up children whom I had spent a lot of time with in my youth. Having spent the lunch quite happily wrangling my two children with GJ, barely sitting down at all, she quietly leaned in to say “I hope you’ll be getting back to your calling soon”. I received that warmly, as I am in a stage of parenting (with which I imagine she herself was once familiar) where the idea that you might think of yourself as anything other than a mother to young children seems completely impossible. But yet, there she was, still an artist, a good one and a devoted one, on the other side of this blink of an eye, reminding me that what may be out of sight must never be fully out of mind.

Here’s one of my favourite Townes songs:

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Now that the tarot series has come to an end — for the next while, though I will post the occasional longer bit of writing, I’ll mostly be posting covers and updates. And I’ll aim to post every two weeks, but as I am currently drowning in children, I may be off by a week or two.

Starting off with Lenker -

my kingdom for a song like this. Possessed poetry

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And in more musically relevant news, I’ve been working on a Raffi tribute album. If you’re not familiar with Raffi (i.e., if you're not North American or don’t have kids), he’s an Armenian-Canadian singer of children’s songs. His 1976 album Singable Song for the Very Young is, in this parent’s opinion, a masterpiece. Among his catalogue, there are plenty of familiar standards from the well-trodden canon of children’s songs, but it’s his own compositions I find most appealing - see here:

The world of children's music is filled with either patronising shite or overstimulating chaos. What I so adore about Raffi is his deadpan sincerity. And the fact that you won’t find him doing brand deals with a toothpaste company. In a world of insincere and nefarious merchandising, Raffi remains a trustworthy and reliable force. He’s still at it. Not many people know of him in Europe. I only came across him via my American friends who loved him growing up and now have kids of their own.

I did a few songs last year for a small vinyl release - but I’m working on some more to make a full album of Raffi covers.

Anyway, I love him. And that’s what I’m up to. And here’s my version of One Light, One Sun:

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I gave birth for the second time in mid-June - two weeks passed my due date, just as my first had been. The wait was horrendous—the promise of the unbearable state of late pregnancy being over. Feeling useless and mammalian, I dragged myself through those last few days, trying to come up with things to keep me cheerful. On what was, unbeknownst to me, t…

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unto the 3rd and 4th generation shall the sins of the father be visited

Exodus 20:5

I believe I was quite young, 9 or 10 maybe, when I recall waking up on more than one occasion with a sharp intake of breath, terrified I would fuck up my children; It sounds dramatic, but I remember it vividly.

It can’t have been till my early teens that I first read the P…

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The central premise of Quakerism is that the light of God exists within all people without exception or prejudice and cannot be stolen, extinguished or even diminished. I attended a Quaker secondary school and suffered through hours and hours of mandatory silent reflection on this. It wasn’t until my daughter was born that…

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