Laura Marling

Overview

Okay, everyone, get out your Laura Marling Cliche Bingo cards: Precocious! Songstress! Wise beyond her years! Waiflike! Preternatural! Used to date that Mumford guy! Ethereal! Joni Mitchell! Stripped-back! Wise beyond her years again for good measure!

Now we've got all that rubbish out of the way, we can write about Marling as the serious, wonderful, once-in-a-generation songwriter and performer she is. Her new album, Once I Was An Eagle (yes, it's a Bill Callahan shout-out) is, like both its predecessors, already being chiselled onto Best of 2013 lists everywhere. It is indeed wise, but it's also guileless and sweet and true and the best possible kind of gut-punching.

She's performing in Sydney on July 22, 23 and 24 as part of the Heavenly Sounds series, at St Stephen's Uniting Church on Macquarie Street, and there are still a handful of tickets available for the third show. If, for some reason, you haven't copped tickets, please allow this video — and her voice, with its clean-sheets clarity and woody warmth — to convince you.