Martha Wainwright

In the oft-played musical game of Whose Yards Were Done The Hardest, Edith Piaf must surely come out on top: parental abandonment, an abject childhood amongst her grandmother’s stable of prostitutes, singing for her supper on the streets of Paris, goodness knows how many failed love affairs, multiple car accidents, substance abuse, and a long, agonising premature death to top it all off.  Indeed, her biography presents a lay down misere of uncompromising sufferance for art, a life spent at the coalface of reality producing one of the most spectacular pop catalogues of the last century.

There’re certainly worse acts to ape.  For Martha Wainwright, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris: Martha Wainwright's Piaf Record, her live-recorded 2009 homage to the diminutive French songstress, was as much a welcome respite from her own material as the product of a lifetime love of the little sparrow’s music.  “My brother introduced me to her music via my mother’s record collection when I was eight or so,” she explains, on the phone from her Brooklyn brownstone ahead of her forthcoming Australian tour.  “I was completely excited by her abandon, her reckless abandon in her vocals.  She quickly became my favourite singer … I admire her for wearing her heart on her sleeve and for, y’know, destroying herself for her art and for her audience … I suppose that she really seems to have given herself over completely to music … which is kind of amazing.”

Though she shows no sign of wishing to emulate Piaf in this respect, Wainwright has certainly passed through her own share of upheavals in the past twelve months.  Having given birth to her first child in late 2009, joy became quickly mingled with anguish with the death of her mother, the late, great Kate McGarrigle several weeks later.  One year on and although the demands of motherhood provide some daily sense of purpose – young Arcangelo (no jokes) is on the verge of crawling, though this remains somewhat difficult as “he’s really quite substantial” – grief continues to make its presence felt, the catharsis of songwriting following only gradually.

“It’s been pretty hard for me to write cause I already write pretty depressing songs,” she comments, “after my Mom died, I’d pick up the guitar and it was just too much … now things are starting to calm a little bit.  Because all I really think about as a songwriter is what’s happened to me … that’s obviously what the new stuff seems to be about.  Kate, really.”

That personal tragedy is feeding the creative process should come as a surprise to no one familiar with Ms Wainwright’s previous material, the Canadian having never been shy of feeding the grist of life’s downsides into the songwriting mill.  Walking aside from the long shadow cast by the incomparable talent of her Judy Garland-singing, opera-composing, prima-donna brother Rufus, Martha began to cast a pretty lengthy one of her own with the titanic emotional swell of her 2005 self-titled debut.  Making an immediate impact thanks to a pair of lungs capable of turning sultry purrs to an unhinged snarl within the same phrase, it was soon followed by the inimitably-titled follow-up I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too (2007), in which the stark confessionals of the first record gave way to more sophisticated imagery and a richer harmonic palette.  However, drawing something of worth from the dregs of her experience has remained a constant.

“That first record came out of songs I’d written between the ages of 18 and 24, where it’s very much a naval gazing period.  So for the second record, although they are just as personal, they’re kind of more couched … I make it a little less obvious, but in truth they’re actually almost just as autobiographical, they’re just more abstract.  But in the second record, the people who are referenced in the songs certainly know who they are!  They recognise themselves for better or for worse, but I thought it would be good not to let anyone else know.”

Indeed, Wainwright has learnt the hard way about the pitfalls of throwing her dirty laundry around the public sphere, as it’s hard to control where it lands.  “I think that I particularly hurt my father’s feelings by writing ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ and telling people it was about him … as you get older you have to be a bit more careful that you don’t shit on people all the time.”

It’s no wonder then that Martha has found the urge to slip into somebody else’s musical clothing difficult to resist, though her by now standard claim of song-writing amateurism fails to convince.  “I always have sung covers because I’m not terribly prolific … I love to sing other people’s songs which are often times better crafted than my own, so I think it’s a good idea.  My songs are so personal that it’s kind of a relief sometimes to sing about something else other than my own exact experience.”

Good news for audiences keen to hear Piaf classics delivered by someone well aware both of the act she has to follow and the transfiguring power of music in hard times.  “Even though I did not try and conjure her [Piaf] up, before performing the songs or recording the songs in the life performance, she automatically seems to show up in the room anyway every time.  She’s hard to run away from and I’m very glad for that.”


Martha Wainwright strut her stuff at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday the 24th of February.

First published in The Brag, Iss. 398, February 7th 2010