Laura Marling / Semper Femina (Deluxe Edition) / 2017
Next Time
quietly urgent, mournful, self-accusatory
A meditation on ecological dread and personal complicity, built almost entirely from the phrase 'it feels like,' as the narrator catalogs a slow-dawning environmental collapse and her own failure to act. The song moves from private confession to a broader indictment of collective denial, ending on an ambiguous plea that may be too late.
environmental collapse complicity and denial self-reproach time running out collective responsibility
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing herself and, by extension, a wider 'we' or humanity; possibly also addressing an intimate other in the tender lines about touch and breath. The voice is reflective and uncertain of its own courage, which makes it feel honest rather than declarative.
What happens
The song opens in a state of vague unease -- time feels off, nature feels wrong -- before naming the narrator's own passivity as fear-driven avoidance. It escalates from personal doubt to a recognition of shared, learned ignorance about clear warning signs, then to an image of someone else's suffering that the narrator can no longer avoid hearing. The final movement collapses the personal and planetary: an intimate goodbye merges with the extinction of the world itself, and the narrator finally refuses to look away, though the song ends uncertain whether that refusal comes too late.
How it's built
Loosely verse-based with a repeated confessional refrain ('I'll do better next time') acting as a pivot rather than a traditional chorus. The opening verses use anaphora to build atmosphere before the refrain interrupts with self-address. The final section breaks the pattern -- the imagery becomes intimate and bodily, then opens into direct moral statement, ending on a fragmented, suspended line that undercuts the song's own title.
Section by section
Opening verses
“the trees are a peculiar green”
The imagery is deliberately imprecise -- feelings rather than facts -- suggesting a narrator who senses wrongness before she can name it. This vagueness mirrors how climate anxiety often arrives as mood before information.
First refrain
The narrator diagnoses her own inaction as fear rather than ignorance, which complicates any easy villain. She's not unaware; she's frozen, and the promise to improve sounds like something she's said before.
Second verse
The warning signs become explicit and collective -- society taught itself to look away. The introduction of a weakly screaming 'her' personifies the suffering (possibly the earth itself, possibly a specific woman) in a way that makes abstraction suddenly visceral.
Second refrain
“Am I really so unkind”
The self-interrogation sharpens into something closer to guilt than anxiety, framing complicity as a moral failing rather than a passive condition.
Bridge
Here the ecological and the intimate fully merge: a tender, physical gesture is cast as possibly final, collapsing the difference between losing a person and losing a world.
Closing section
“there may never / next time be”
The title's premise is undone in the final lines. The broken syntax enacts the collapse it describes, and the shift to naming 'folks like me' as culpable moves the song from confession to accusation, though it stops short of offering resolution or hope.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'it feels like' openings create a droning, incantatory unease, mimicking the slow creep of recognition rather than sudden alarm.
- ambiguous address
- The pronoun shifts between 'I,' an unnamed 'her,' and 'we' blur the line between personal relationship and planetary crisis, letting private grief and ecological grief bleed into each other.
- refrain as irony
- The promise to 'do better next time' is repeated with increasing hollowness as the song makes clear there may be no next time, turning a self-help platitude into an indictment.
- volta
- The shift from tender, intimate imagery of touch and breath to blunt moral accusation in the final section reframes everything before it as elegy rather than warning.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a climate song disguised as a breakup or elegy -- the ambiguity is the point, since ecological grief and personal grief share the same vocabulary of loss, denial, and delayed reckoning. An alternative reading takes it more literally as a song about a dying relationship or a dying person, with environmental imagery used metaphorically to externalize private guilt. The text supports both without confirming either, and the final direct line about the world dying at human hands tips the balance toward the ecological reading without fully discarding the intimate one.
Context
Semper Femina (2017) is largely concerned with womanhood, intimacy, and self-scrutiny rather than overt political statement, which makes this song's late turn toward explicit environmental language notable. I don't have reliable specific information about the writing circumstances of this particular track, so this reading is based on the lyric text itself rather than confirmed authorial intent.
Listen for
- the flattening, hypnotic repetition of 'it feels like' phrases and how it builds unease without resolution
- the shift in vocal tone if present between the anxious verses and the more resigned refrain
- how the imagery narrows from atmospheric (trees, air) to bodily (breath, hair) as the song progresses
- the final broken line and whether the vocal delivery treats it as plea, accusation, or resignation
About Laura Marling
Laura Beatrice Marling is an English folk singer-songwriter. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brit Awards and was nominated for the same award at the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 Brit Awards.
b. 1990 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue