Thank you so much for all the fascinating questions – this has been fun!

The Valley, I wrote it in Nashville, very late at night. I just had this vision of a friend of mine standing in the middle of a windy field, a dreamlike image to me - not being able to touch her. And I found it quite chilling, I guess. That way that people close up when they're processing something so disturbing, and you can't really access them.

That's a good question because I find the aesthetic side really difficult. I'm not very aesthetically driven, and as a result all my covers have a wildly different covers. For this one I relied on the help of a woman who creative directed it; Justin Tyler Close, the photographer, he's done an amazing aesthetic. I rely on other people, very much so.

I'm sorry to hear you've had a time of crisis. I didn't cry at all in my early 20s but I'm making up for it now! There was a time when someone said to be: you'll never write songs when you're happy, and this was a time I was in love. For a long time I thought searching for melancholy was the source of all songwriting, but as I've got older, I've realised that isn't necessary, and I wouldn't wish heartbreak on anybody, which is what that person was wishing on me, in a way. Heartbreak is a really... it's a spectacular thing. It opens up a big crack in the vortex for a while, and things can come through from that, but it's very, very difficult.

Great question. Yes, I do that all the time. I only ever really change "you", but I sometimes sing in the second person rather than the first person. But I'd have to sit down and think about the ones I do that in. Sometimes I think they sound a lot better in the second person and make more sense – sometimes I wish I'd written them in a different way, and found a much better way to say something!

I'm going to say some recent ones I've very much enjoyed: Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, a fantastic short story writer. A book called Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. And then this incredible psychobiography by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Beginning of Terror, and that's by David Kleinbard. A psychobiography is sort of reading into work of a poet with what we know about his biography and going on in his life, and making psychological assertions about why he wrote in the way he did. Something I hope no-one ever writes about me!

Recently I've found myself singing All By Myself. It's the perfect song to be attached to, because you are inevitably are all by yourself, and all throughout my adult life that's the song I've caught myself singing.

I do play a couple of instruments, none of them as well as the guitar. I wish I had stuck with piano, I wish wish wish... I can't read music, so piano was an obstacle to playing the piano, and I wish I'd learned. But c'est la vie.

I think this is a really interesting question, I really like it. I did a podcast a couple of years ago, Reversal of the Muse and it was in some ways trying to cover this topic, in the sense that I always felt in need of a mentor that I hadn't had, and I came into my mid-20s I felt quite strongly I'd like that mentor to be a woman, who has experienced being a woman in a similar experience to me. I didn't really find that, but through the process of doing that podcast, I grew a network that I found very useful, that I met in my search, the people I interviewed. And how it started to feel like an open source network: this is my experience, this is how we handled it, kind of thing. And even better for its lack of hierarchy, the mentor-mentee hierarchy didn't exist in that sense. It's a really important thing - I've been thinking of ways of making it a more formal thing, a mentorship scheme or something.

I was at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur a year or two ago, and there was a quote on the wall from him, and it talked about why he decided to stop writing and start painting at the end of his life. And he said: painting was the only medium in which I couldn't cause people harm. I thought that was brilliant – the characters in his paintings are so subjective, no one could take ownership of them or be hurt by them. I don't actually think that about my own songs, though I've had one experience when someone thought a song was about themselves, and confronted me about it, and all it did was kind of... I had think about it for a few years. As somebody sort of writing creative non fiction, for someone to intrude and insist on their participation in it, is really unhelpful. I don't intentionally caricature people I know.

I love Lizzo's album. I really love Lizzo's album. It's just the most incredible feelgood album, and that feelgood is so palpable in her music.

Because I've only recently been involved in social media, I've only just been made aware of this, and it's been a really nice surprise. Generally why songs aren't put on records is because they're not good enough, but this made me think some just didn't have the right place on a record. I like that you can find a random track of mine online and feel like you've discovered it – I won't be releasing them.

My favourite tuning at the moment is E A C* E A E. And that's what Goodbye England is written in, and Alexandra from the new album. It's a tuning I've spent less time in, so I'm discovering new things in it. It creates a totally new relationship with the guitar and that's why I'm into it.

Quite a question. Songs do feel like children. When I wrote Fortune for this album, I felt like that was one of the better songs I've ever written, though I'm not sure we actually quite captured it on the recording. I judge it by what songs still make me cry when I play them, What He Wrote and Goodbye England are still the most affecting on me personally. Goodbye England is so close to my heart, and What He Wrote, I don't know why. Why one is more affecting that the other. Weird!

Lump, again, has anxiety about whether I should be pushing the boat out with my own songwriting. For better and worse. On this album, I felt no pressure to do anything other than very simple instrumentation and production, and I think that was nice, a relief for me – Lump covers that entire area now. And how one decides what is the appropriate songwriting or production tool to use, I listen to a particular era of music, music made in 1969, I collect records made in 1969. And that has a huge impact on my taste in mixing in particular. I'm interested in the result of where they were at technologically then, mixed in with art; I was interested in that era, and then I realised most of my favourite records were made then or near then: Nashville Skyline, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats... I settled on that year and it became a collector thing, that narrowed down what I was looking for in record shops.

And when I'm making an album I try not to listen to anyone else because it confuses me.

Yes, is the short answer. I think the period of most accelerated learning musically in the last couple of years has been working with Blake Mills, partly because he's an astonishing musician with an unusual palette, but he won't slow down, too - you have to keep up with him. I felt huge pressure to keep up with him when I was recording with him, and since then, seeing how he understands music sort of propels my form of what I take out of musical inspiration. Miserere Me, Deus, that soprano line, I transposed it to guitar to work out the harmonic relationship – and then that will go on to inform something that I will write at a later date.

I think that I've learned from other people that's there's a real advantage to being an introvert, which is allowing people to keep speaking and letting them say what they're actually feeling underneath what they're saying. My bassist Nick Tini, I see the way people talk to him, it's amazing what they say to him, what they reflect back to him - he is a very wise man, and I've no doubt that's because of his listening abilities.

At the moment, and I can't pronounce this accurately – Miserere Mei, Deus, by Gregorio Allegri. There's a melody in it sung by a soprano and it's one of the most heavenly things I've ever heard, I couldn't believe it when I first heard it.

I think that's quite a common thing that people say, I've heard Tom Waits say that I think. And I think you know things in a place that inaccessible to how you're feeling, a long time before they're given symbolic form. I don't think it's magic, I think that when you open up that creative part of your brain, you're giving form to something. In the last couple of weeks, I've felt generally fine apart from natural worries about people on the front line and people you love, but occasionally I'm struck with very random outbursts of crying and there's no immediate reason for it. I think on the other side of this experience, I think we'll all have to process this communal trauma. It's hard to digest these things as they're happening. I think that's also part of what happens in songwriting, generally.

I think I've been blessed with this middling success, neither here nor there. That's been good fortune - it can be quite a bore to be left alone with myself, so I've had to self-motivate to keep learning. When I was younger, I was quite petulant - I wasn't interested in popular culture, and that's protected me from anyone thinking I should be more popular. But now I'm interested in popular culture and the popular palette: pop culture changed a lot in ten years, it bled over into... I wouldn't know how to assess that actually.

It's amazing now how much of an influence pop culture has over people's ideas, and how feminism has been affected, has been phenomenal, and different versions of it.

Lump has given me a great opportunity to be a different persona to the Laura Marling, it allows Laura Marling to keep going off in that direction. Lump is completely off the rails, it really does feel like a creature of its own, when I walk into my studio and I'm in the sonic world he's created, the Laura Marling preoccupations don't make an appearance.

Thank you very much! This is the first album that I've written while not being on the road. In some ways I was on the road because I was travelling around Europe for two months, but I came back, and set up my own studio - a studio properly of my own, and it gave me this opportunity to map out the instrumentation and the sonic palette of the album. I loved the process of making Short Movie and self-producing, but you need someone to steer the ship with you, you shouldn't always rely on your own opinion. So I had an incredible engineer, and it was interesting; having worked with Blake Mills who was an extraordinarily detailed producer, I'd never seen anyone work so hard.

It was a trip, a little experiment. All the live stuff with the band, we had an amazing pedal steel player, and the drums, we did all that in a proper recording studio.