Songfacts®:

• 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."
• The song features a string section arranged by American instrumentalist Rob Moose, who has also worked with Sufjan Stevens, Alabama Shakes and Bon Iver. When Moose sent his arrangement to Marling, he told her, "I don't know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything." Marling was thrilled by what he'd done.
• Laura Marling 's boyfriend, George Jephson, gets a songwriting credit too. "My boyfriend, who lives with me, is also a musician and was playing this chord sequence over and over," Marling explained to NME. "Eventually I absorbed it by proximity, and when I wrote the song, I realised that I'd stolen his chord sequence. So he's got a co-writing credit."
  
  Composer/producer George Jephson also has credits for:
  
  Backing vocals on Places, the debut album of '60s chanteuse Jane Birkin's daughter, Lou Doillon.
  
  Production of folk musician Ross Heselton's 2012 song "A Rose For Winter."
• Having been in the limelight since she was 17, Marling has found herself in several dodgy situations.
  
  Taking advice from some old balding bore
  You'll ask yourself, "Did I want this at all?"
  
  The lyric holds deep personal significance for Marling. "It is essentially a letter to my younger self," she explained to NME. "I think it's part of the human condition to long for a mentor, and I wish that someone had instructed me in my ability to say no, or to walk out of the room if I felt uncomfortable."
• The album was inspired by Maya Angelou's 2008 book of essays, Letter to My Daughter, which is worded to a daughter she never had. Marling explained to Mojo magazine:
  
  "That daughter felt universal. I also really feel like a 30-year-old woman now, but I'm also thinking about that teenage girl I was when I started out, and what she was like. Somehow, I feel that I should defend the girl now in her transition to adulthood. I've also learnt that part of growing up is realizing you don't have to create this serious facade. That impulse is part of the system that keeps women from themselves."
• Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose voice carried both on the page and in the public square. She's best remembered for her series of autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), a groundbreaking work that turned her early life into one of the enduring classics of American literature.
  
  Maya Angelou's influence stretches far beyond literature. Here are a few more musical nods:
  
  Tanita Tikaram - "Twist In My Sobriety" (1988)
  The first line – "All God's children need traveling shoes" - is the title of Angelou's 1986 memoir.
  
  Olivia Newton-John - "Phenomenal Woman" (2000)
  Recorded for a benefit album celebrating Angelou, this Woman's anthem borrows the title from Angelou's iconic 1995 poem.
  
  Common (feat. Maya Angelou) – "The Dreamer" (2011)
  The hip-hop track closes with Angelou herself reciting a poem she wrote for the song.
  
  Laura Mvula - "Phenomenal Woman" (2016)
  A vibrant self-empowerment anthem drawing directly from Angelou's 1995 poem.
  
  Clipse - "The Birds Don't Sing" (2025)
  The song takes its title from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, twisted with Malice's bleak observation that "you think the birds are singing, but they're really screeching in pain."
  
  Fiona Apple
  Apple has often spoken about how Angelou's writing, particularly I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, shaped her own approach to vulnerability and truth in lyrics.