Martha Wainwright is the kid-sister scion of a Canadian-American folk music dynasty, a fact not so notable for what is to American Popular music, a particular provincial renown, but for multi-generational musical avouchment; the inescapable gravity of a family that sings its sins to the public. She grew up at the knees of Leonard Cohen, Emmilou Harris, Richard and Linda Thompson, etc. It is an inescapable and fascinating bramble of musical history.
I want you to watch the YouTube video of ‘Proserpina‘ from Not So Silent Night, McGarrigle & Wainwright Christmas Celebration at the Royal Albert Hall, December 9th, 2009. This is the last song written by her mother, Kate McGarrigle, and performed here by her, a month before she died of cancer far too young at 63. The recommendation menu will likely offer Martha’s haunting rendition in a sparse head-on video of the track that anchored her 2012 Album, Come Home to Mama. The song stands on its own, but the context dares you to tears. A mother twice over, Martha Wainwright is well grown up now.
Of her father, louche folk singer, Loudon Wainwright III, she has said, “For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do, especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can’t tell our side of the story. As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’.” That song was the hand grenade she smuggled into her eponymous first album twenty years ago. The current tour is built on this anniversary. But it is also a tour of her recent memoir, ‘Stories I Might Regret Telling You,‘ from which she reads some of that bramble at each show.
Martha was kind enough to grant me some of her time between the tour’s first and second leg.
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Interview: Martha Wainwright”
