Comes out and plays through the album that made her, that created a being separate from lineage, too mature for this crude southern land, the pedigree and the world wise chanteuse disorienting pop music. Self aware, the first line is an irrepressible fein to the Carpenter’s ‘Superstar’. The very first line claims a place: Long ago, and so very…Introducing her second cousin, singing fragile harmonies, I wonder if she is fretting her high end. But her matured self has shed that hedonist smokers rasp, the registers unfold of each other with a well-earned mastery. Some singers have such distinction that it’s almost a natural filter. This is the woman who dared pay homage to the incendiary Edith Piaf. Tossing her hair and kicking out a knee, she sings from her toes, but always knows where the mic is with precision. The band elaborates familiar, but does not intrude.
Family, ugh. At this point, it’s marriage and dissolution, children and death. Her insouciant father joined her last show, fittingly at the Troubadour, and her brother honored a longstanding competition.
At this point, that’s all well-heeled reflection. Martha writes, performs, and seems to live with her feelings handcuffed to her sleeves. “This is a lifestyle needs to be honored,” she says of her glittering and ramshackle days, full of songs, bars, and failing drunk men. Every track on this album is in conversation with the others.
Also in conversation with the present. She presents her memoir and her most recent album. Love Will Be Reborn as its midwife, as a reckoning on life so far. A career that started with a bloody motherfucking takedown of her father, and all dissolute men really, and is closing it with a fierce mother’s grief — the new matriarch.
I am impressed and illuminated by her vocal virtuosity but more so by her vital generosity—in her songs, delivery, memoir, and engagement.
