It’s a family problem. How do you tell a story about Martha Wainwright without mentioning her kin? It’s not that it can’t be done, but that the cost of omission is much colour and texture.
Calling from New York, Martha sounds chirpy but a little weary, the vocal equivalent of a smile that turns up the sparkle in her eyes without quite turning up the corners of her mouth. She salts her speech with the phrase “you know”, which is quite appropriate because, for the most part, we do.
Martha, 34, is the child of musician and sometime actor Loudon Wainwright III and the folk singer Katie McGarrigle. Her older brother is the flamboyant Rufus, arguably the most luminous of the constellation. They’ve performed as a family, they’ve been interviewed as a family, and they’re uncommonly open in speech and song. And having all these Wainwrights in the same story means you end up referring to them by their first name, further enhancing the aura of familiarity.
The result is a hefty novel’s worth of coverage, one that keeps expanding to more and more unwieldy lengths. If you want to know more, Google is your friend. Better, perhaps, to ask if Martha has ever wanted to be on the other end of the notebook or microphone, asking a journalist what their family is like, or what their relationship is with their brother?
“No, well, I’m not really interested,” she says, cracking up. “I don’t know why people are so interested in my family – we must be interesting. I guess we sort of stand out because we work together as a family as well, and there aren’t that many examples of the sort of dynastic thing that we have.”
It’s not just dynastic. Besides the luminaries that are blood relations, the family has a level of well-connectedness that borders on the ridiculous. Mention a gathering that includes Nick Cave, Emmylou Harris and Leonard Cohen and for most people that’s the beginning of a pretty decent festival. For the Wainwrights, that’s breakfast. And never mind dirty laundry, a phrase that always seems to indicate the revelation of irredeemable messes – this family uses music as its washing machine.
Case in point is a song by her father called I’d Rather Be Lonely, about a woman for whom Martha always felt sorry. Until the day he told an audience that it was about his daughter. Her response was the lovingly caustic Bloody Mother F---ing Asshole, which swoops and soars and has one of the best lines to ever open a song: “Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore.”
The appeal is voyeuristic, as if a listener is privy to the process of issues being discussed and, perhaps, resolved. But seriously, does it not occur to them to pick up the phone?
“That’s what songwriters do. They’re not going to text their boyfriend about a crappy relationship, they’ll write a song about it,” Martha says. “We do the same thing, it’s just that we’re doing it to each other. I grew up listening to songs my parents sang about one another, and songs written about me, and I liked the attention. I thought it was normal.”
The latest addition to this canon of confessional communication is a song by Rufus taking his sister to task for not picking up his calls in the time before their mother died. Its title – a paean to ambiguity – is Martha.
As far as excuses go, hers was pretty good – a two-months premature boy called Arcangelo, born in November 2009. In typical Wainwright fashion, Martha penned an article in The Times thanking the medical staff who ensured the safety of her and her baby. This was scant months before the heart-rending coverage of Kate McGarrigle’s passing January last year, which included a Guardian article headlined “Rufus Wainwright: ‘I was looking right into her face when my mother died’ ”. It meant that a departure from the family was as much in the public eye as its most recent addition, who has been “a dream” on the road as he follows Martha on tour. So, after being practically born in the spotlight, would she want Arcangelo to remain in it?
“Only if he’s good!” Martha exclaims. “I’ll have to hear what he sounds like. After London, my first instinct was to want him to be a doctor, because his life was in their hands and I had a huge respect for what they did for us. I certainly don’t have an itching for him to be a musician, but I’m not going to stop him.”
Martha has said some very raw and very lovely things about feeling vulnerable and unattractive and inferior in terms of looks and talent, about not being pursued as a teenager and as a young woman. These are the most beautiful and relatable of crises, slivers of insecurity capable of causing gaping wounds. But in the years since she started singing, Martha’s experiences have inevitably changed her outlook – not just marriage, to musician and producer Brad Albetta, but the bittersweet duality of becoming a mother almost at the same time that she lost her own.
“I’m much more content, in many ways, as I get older. I’m more comfortable in my own skin, of course, but also deeply humbled by the experiences I’ve had travelling on the road, building a career and then, of course, losing my mother. There’s not as much room for vanity and feeling sorry for myself because I basically need to be stronger,” she says.
There are hints of this growth between her first and second albums – a little less anger, a little more gazing at the horizon instead of her navel, able to tell stories other than her own. But does she ever worry that if she gets too happy, too secure, she’ll be unable to tap into that invaluably fecund well of inner turmoil?
A star in her own right: Martha Wainwright performs at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 2010.
CHRISTIE GOODWIN / REDFERNS / GETTY IMAGES
“I don’t know if I’m getting too happy. I’m content, which is different, but there is certainly enough turmoil and problems and sadness in the word to write a thousand songs,” Martha says.
“The real challenge is how to to put things into words in an interesting and poetic way, and to find the artistic commitment to strive for something that is good. That’s sometimes what I worry about, that life and life’s normalcies can get in the way of an artist’s need to seek out something that is powerful and resonant.”
Martha liberally applies those adjectives to the work of Edith Piaf, whom she describes as her “first and most constant influence”. The McGarrigle record collection, which is legion and lauded by Martha and Rufus many a time, prompted a first encounter with Piaf at the age of about eight.
“She was my favourite singer when I was a little girl. At first, I thought it wasn’t a good idea because she’s too famous and has too iconic a voice, but I became interested in making a tribute not only to Piaf but also to the songwriters and the songs of the era.”
Martha is touring in support of her Piaf tribute, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, a Paris. Looking through the record, it’s immediately obvious that she has steered clear of the more famous tracks – a thorny decision, but there’s not a La Vie En Rose in sight.
“I felt that I was trying to avoid too much comparison between her version and my version. I felt that the more interesting thing would be to make an album that included some lesser-known songs.” She thinks for a moment. “I just picked songs based on whether or not I could sing them. They’re challenging songs. It didn’t really matter how famous they were or if they were related in any way. The relation was only that they were interpreted at some point by Edith Piaf.”
Less obvious, however, is the fact that the album was recorded live, which only becomes clear when the audience’s applause kicks in at the end of the third track. Martha says it was the best way to express the urgency necessary for Piaf’s music.
“With studio records you’re much more precious about your voice, and if it’s sounding pretty, and which take to use, whereas in this situation we just had to go with the best performance that we could in that moment,” she says.
“That’s also the way a lot of people recorded back in her era, and because she’s such a famous live singer and street performer, it’s in the same spirit. But it certainly wasn’t a rest for my vocal chords, it was an exercise, and hopefully I’ve become a better singer because of it just by virtue of having to do things I wouldn’t normally do.”
That may be hard to tell, because it’s not easy to list the things Martha would normally do. Her voice, which takes the prerequisites of whisky and cigarettes and gives them a light lacquer of honey, is wonderfully supple. She’s capable of sounding like different people on different tracks, never mind different albums, and she’s just as happy writing music for the Royal Ballet as she is collaborating with Snow Patrol. But she insists that these are not mere detours.
“It’s more that I have very eclectic taste in music. I grew up with my mother’s record collection and people that I met through her as a young person, and also my brother’s musical taste was really across the map, so I appreciated classical music and country music and punk rock and folk. I had an image of myself being able to do all of these things, and that’s sort of how I see myself, non-committal. I have trouble sort of sticking to one thing.”
The Piaf album may be an indulgence, but it makes a nice counterpoint to the heavily guitar-based sound of her previous work, as well as to Rufus, who has the ability to leave craters in songs in the size and shape of his voice. In the past, it felt like the difference between Martha and her brother was the difference between singing at the back of a bar and crooning at the forefront of baroque. But this tendency to experiment, to venture into the space between genre, is why you can’t discuss Martha without discussing the Wainwrights, because so much of what they are is due to being steeped in song and each other.
“Although Rufus and I share so many of the same musical genes, there’s such a difference in what we can do and what we’re good at. But when I sing, I sound a little bit like my mother, and a little bit like my father – people recognise my family in me. I think that would be really impossible to try and get rid of or deny, and it’s something I’m very proud of.”
» Martha Wainwright Sings Piaf Melbourne Recital Centre, March 3, 7.30pm and March 6, 6pm. Tickets $80-$108. 9699 2228
» www.melbournerecital.com.au