Warrior

Album: Short Movie (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • Laura Marling opens her Short Movie album with a story in which she is a horse, and 'you' are the titular 'warrior.' It was inspired by the Chilean avant-garde filmmaker and author Alejandro Jodorowsky. She explained to Uncut: "It's a story about a horse throwing off his warrior - or her warrior - and the horse deciding that the warrior is not noble enough. 'Warrior' is a Jodorowsky reference."
  • The song starts off with some unsettling industrial noise. Marling explained to Mojo: "I've been living in LA for the last couple of years and I think I became extremely sensitive to urban noise. The sound on Warrior is a bowed de-tuned electric guitar through a Memory Man - seven shades of f--ked up, but it's very affecting."

    "It's the feeling I got the first time I saw Blade Runner, that feeling of a metallic future."
  • This was inspired by a lot of things that Marling was thinking about at the time. "I've always been interested in stories behind occultism," she explained to Under The Radar magazine. "That was the imagery that was going through my mind."

    "I was also living in LA," Marling added "There's this kind of mindfulness revolution thing going on here. It [smacked] of this strange passivity. It was like a way of pacifying people so they don't have to deal with stuff. Which is a really cynical thing to say."

    "I was talking about it with a friend of mine who is a psychologist," she continued. "He was describing it as the death of the warrior and the idea that war is the beginning of all things. Violence is a reactionary thing and passion is an action. I was so desperately looking for answers to all my moral questions in life and I was quite often coming up against people who were just like giving me a 'Peace and Love' sign. I was like, 'That's not f---ing good enough.'"
  • Laura Marling released a deluxe edition of Short Movie, which includes a reworked version of this song along with a different full band rendition of "I Feel Your Love." Two other tracks, B-sides "David" and "Daisy," are also included on the disc. Speaking about the new styles on the tracks, Marling said: "We recorded them this way to honor the alchemical change that occurs within a musical group when you add a new brain or flavor to it."

    "Pete (Randell, guitar)'s style of playing combined with a lack of need to be delicate for the sake of hearing strings led to the tone becoming thicker and grittier. And as an unexpected result, we discovered that we like sticky rhythms...and seem to speak a similar language in rhythm and tone, it's a very special quite rare thing!"

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