LAURA Marling will open her spring tour on Yorkshire soil, performing at Leeds Town Hall with her full band on March 8, two days before the release of her sixth studio album, Semper Femina.

"The title comes from a Virgil poem, and the full quote from the poem is 'Varium et mutabile semper femina'. which I might be pronouncing wrong but the translation is: 'fickle and changeable, always a woman', so it's better off as just 'always a woman'," says Laura.

Semper Femina emerged from a "particularly masculine time" in the life of the 27-year-old Hampshire-born singer-songwriter. So much so that she approached the album as if she were a man writing about a woman, only to later realise she had no need to construct songs from a man's perspective.

How did those feelings ultimately inform Laura's latest set of folk songs? "We're somewhat accustomed to seeing women through men's eyes, and naturally that was my inclination to try and take some power over that," she says. "But I very quickly realised that the powerful thing to do was to look at women through a woman's eyes. It was a little stumble at the beginning of the record, a self-conscious stumble."

Where Laura's romantic and literary lyrics were once in part inspired by literary fiction, now she is more drawn to poems. "I used to read a lot of fiction and I don't any more, but I read a lot of poetry," she says. "So, Gothic Romantic literature used to play quite a big part in my vocabulary of emotional experience. Now that I have my own emotional experiences, many of them, I like drawing on them and delving into poetry more, as well as literary fiction/fantasy.

"My favourite poet is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was a bit of a hopeless romantic. He's the reason that I got to writing this record in some ways because I was researching his life for writing the libretto for an opera."

Laura has made Semper Femina with producer Blake Mills in a break from recording with Ethan Johns. "Blake Mills is an extraordinary musician and I'd become very accustomed to working with Ethan Johns, who is also an extraordinary musician. We've made five records together, so we have a very established way of working," she says.

"Working with Blake all of a sudden was quite a shock to the system because he has a very different way and he is incredibly innovative. He's not very far in age from me, so we kind of met at a similar level which I've never experienced. I would go home every night from the studio and practise guitar because I wanted to be as good as him.

"Over the three weeks we were playing together, my guitar playing improved a lot, and he's just someone who has spent a lot of time playing guitar and it made me think I need to spend some more time playing guitar, so that was good. He's got an incredible tonal palette and he's a cool cat, so it was a great honour."

If Laura's last album, 2015's Short Movie, offered a glimpse into her life after moving to Los Angeles and Semper Femina "looks at women through a woman's eyes", where might this ever-questing songwriter's stories head next? "So where are my stories going now? I don't know!" she says. "When I wrote Short Movie it felt like I was writing about something I was going to experience rather than something I had experienced. And music has a funny way, or creativity has a funny way, of being ahead of you.

"So I don't know where I am now, because maybe it's still catching up to me. I think whereas Short Movie was more based on a landscape, this new album was more based in thought."

Laura Marling plays Leeds O2 Academy on March 8, doors open at 7pm; for ticket information, go to live.lauramarling.com/#tour. Laura's new album, Semper Femina, will be released on March 10 on More Alarming Records.