Recently married and with a distinctive album winning her new fans, Martha Wainwright no longer has to worry about getting out of the shadow of her illustrious musical family, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
SHE ARRIVES WITH a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, yet Martha Wainwright remains efficiently polite when faced with yet another media interview. Backstage at Vicar Street, and due on stage in a few hours, Wainwright sees the promotional duties she's currently undertaking for her second and quite excellent album, I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too, as a way of defining herself as a creative entity apart from her brother Rufus, father Loudon and mother Kate McGarrigle.
"I was able for the first time to go into the studio as an artist, a singer and musician," she says. "And that was a great relief to me. You can hear it in the music, in that it isn't so much steeped in the trials and errors of trying to get out of the shadow of my family, or other things that I can be plagued by."
The songs on the new album, she adds, are intense in their subject matter, but the approach is not as dramatic as it was on her 2005 debut, Martha Wainwright. "On the new record it's more about serving the songs and serving the music. My intention was very much helped by having in mind a slightly poppier approach. It was that way in my mind and in my heart, and I suppose I just wanted to have a bit more fun with it."
While it's impossible to dissociate her from her family, the latest album should certainly win her new fans of her own. The quality of the songwriting establishes her proudly alongside her father and brother, while it also removes her stylistically from the grounded, poignant folk of the former and the often ostentatious soulful pop of the latter. In short, through songs that touch on the memory of former lovers (Bleeding All Over You), her mother's tussle with cancer (In the Middle of the Night), the practicality of emotional commitment (Niger River) and the suicide of a respected friend (The George Song), Martha has not just grown up but moved out. It's taken time - she is not, as she admits, the most prolific of songwriters, though this is partly to do with a desire for quality over quantity.
"I don't write too many songs, that's true," she says. "It isn't that I write 100 songs a year and of that amount 10 are good. It's more that I write 10 a year and I'll work on these and start abandoning things as I go along. One of the reasons why I'm not prolific is that I don't lead my life solely as a songwriter/musician, you know, the kind of person who sees everything around them as a potential song. There are a lot of songwriters and musicians who constantly play guitar, which is really annoying backstage when you're trying to get ready for your show. They perceive everything as if it could be material, they walk around holding patterned paper and a pen.
"Perhaps I lead my life in a more usual way, in that I have normal days where I wash the dishes, clean the toilet, go to the bank, look through e-mails. After a couple of weeks of that ordinary life I get edgy, and I've figured that's because I haven't played a gig. Hopefully, that downtime of living life, of engaging with household stuff, of taking long walks, looking around and being as observant as I can, will give me something to sing about or some experience to write about.
"I think I have pretty good taste, and I trust it. I don't always know exactly what I want, but I know what I don't like. That's helpful to my songwriting. Generally, the stranger or more honest the lyric, the better it is for me. The thing that feeds my songs quite often are my experiences, so if I can convey in an interesting way, through poetry, something that has actually happened or occurred to me, then I trust that it's a fair and legitimate choice I have made to speak about it."
UNUSUALLY FOR A songwriter generally (if incorrectly) perceived as a folkie, Wainwright writes not just from the heart but from the groin. Some of the songs on I Know You're Married moan and groan with the weight of candour, but she has made the move from bald-statement ingénue (check out her debut album's song about her father, Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole) to a rather subtler chronicler of the human spirit.
"I have learned to write about things that are personal," she tellingly reveals, "without objectifying anybody or anything, and that's been an important lesson for me. It's useful not to dump on people while simultaneously expressing a truth or a feeling if it's necessary, without diluting the intensity of the lyric."
She bemoans the fact that some songwriters are safe to the point of redundancy in what they'll say, and believes it's important to push certain barriers.
"This is why I have sexual references in some of my songs, a little bit of gore and gross detail," she says. "It's strong stuff, which is how I feel life is. It's also my sense of humour. Plus, there's a glint of vulnerability in my songs that is important not to erase. What I do, particularly on stage, is not naive or coquettish. No, there's nothing of the coquette about me - my mother didn't teach me that one!
"Is writing in such a way cathartic? Definitely. If I didn't have that, I think I'd be more screwed up as a person. Songwriting is something that I have had to do, and because of it I'm a happier person. Putting out the first record, gaining an audience, being applauded and told I was good at something - that helped me. I'm very well equipped to handle a lot of things now, primarily because I have the medium of songwriting to express myself. Wouldn't that be helpful to anyone?"
Despite her realistic and often acerbic world view, Wainwright has taken to married life well (she recently got hitched to musician and record producer Brad Albetta). There are so many other things in her life, she reckons, that are not secure: the record industry, where she lives (a rundown house in Brooklyn), how her new record might be perceived, the notion of success.
Marriage and love, she says, are constants that she can depend on. Listening to some of her songs wouldn't necessarily tell you that she's a romantic though, would they?
"Oh, I'm very romantic, I think," she says, pushing the cynical pragmatist accusations out the window. "I've always been a real piner for people, things, and I've always found that love seems to find its way into every element of life, in different ways."
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I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Toois on release via PIAS Distribution Ireland