Laura Marling’s seventh album is addressed to an imaginary daughter: it provides succour, perspective and more than a few warnings. “Sometimes the hardest thing to learn is what you get from what you lose,” she muses on Blow by Blow. The title track counsels against taking advice from “some old balding bore” in the music industry who wants her to remove her clothes.

Having taken a step back from music, Marling has returned better than ever: focused and oaky and gauzy. Here, she channels the north American singer-songwriter canon quite plainly, landing somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan on Strange Girl, with detours into Leonard Cohen (the excellent Only the Strong, the opener Alexandra, which takes its cue from Cohen’s Alexandra Leaving) and Neil Young; her fascination with Paul McCartney is newfound.

Normally, you’d roll your eyes at such breathtaking derivations, but Marling’s record is so mellifluous and listenable, in part thanks to the unobtrusive string arrangements by Bob Moose (Bon Iver, The National), that you can’t fault her for cribbing off the greats. Somehow, Marling has found her register – her voice languid, soft, sarcastic and ecstatic by turns; she does all these and mutters asides as well on the superlative Hope We Meet Again. “If you were mine I’d let you live your life,” she sings on The End of the Affair, a promise that works just as well spoken to an imaginary child as it does to a lover.