THERE’S at least one time in everyone’s life when you want to scream expletives at your father. It’s pretty rare, though, that you get to record your sentiments and turn them into an anthem of sorts, and even rarer that your father accepts it with a shrug and a wry smile, thinking you’re just like him.
For the 28-year-old singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, however, the reaction to her startling song BMFA was perhaps inevitable. She is the daughter of the acerbic singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and folk singer Kate McGarrigle, whose divorce and messy family life was played out in songs such as Pretty Little Martha and Father-Daughter Dialogue.
“I shed a lot of tears listening to their music when it was about me or about each other, but I think it helped me to deal with their divorce,” Wainwright says. “I think that the one thing my family has is that it doesn’t need any help expressing itself. We wear everything on our sleeves and I think that’s been helpful. It also gives you the licence to write songs like Bloody Mother F****** A****** and you don’t have to think twice about it because that’s the idea – get it out in song.”
And get it out she does. Wainwright, who starts a UK tour on Monday, pulls no punches on her upcoming self-titled debut album. Whether she’s singing about the dodgy lotharios who “Bend [her] over the back of the car seat and take [her] down to Easy Street” or “the chick with the dick and the gift for the gab” at a hip New York party making her feel lonely and out of place, Wainwright has a sharp eye and a filthy mouth. But from it comes a rich, expressive voice that is alternately shimmering, coquettish and gravelly.
“Lyrics are hard for me because every single one of them has been true,” she declares. “They’re very rooted in truth; almost every phrase is based on a fact. That takes a long time because no one’s life is that interesting,” she laughs. “It takes a long time to make poetry out of the banal, to figure out if there’s anything you want to say about something. They’re mostly about love and lifestyle and feeling bad about myself.”
Nevertheless it’s her family that provides the most fertile territory for her songs. BMFA is perhaps the only song on her album that feels both modern and classic, as though either of her parents could sing it as well as her. “There’s no argument that it sounds like one of [my father’s] songs,” she says. “Subconsciously it might be me trying to get his attention or gain his respect, which is what the song is about, so why not use his medium?
“I wasn’t really close to him, but desperate for his attention and a horrible teenager and hated him and loved him at the same time.”
Wainwright was brought up by her mother in Montreal while her father lived in New York and London. When she was 14, Wainwright lived with her father for a year in New York. “I started that year as a 14-year-old; I ended it as a 23-year-old,” she says. “I wasn’t like shooting up on the doorstep every night or anything, but living in a one-bedroom apartment with a parent who is of the opposite sex at age 14 isn’t the most ideal of circumstances. I learnt way too much about my family that year.”
She started writing songs when she was 18 and singing back-up for her brother, the operatic folk troubadour Rufus Wainwright. “I noticed how much attention he was getting and I was incredibly jealous,” she says. “I thought, maybe I should take a crack at this, and I wrote a song and it was quite good. Maybe I was ready to write it and it was about my father’s last child — right away into the family, right away it was a Loudon Wainwright song where you are picking out somebody and telling all of their details.”
While the sins of the father can be revisited on the daughter, for her that family isn’t simply a prison of fate and awkwardness. It can also sustain and nourish. Wainwright credits her brother with teaching her “to sing much better than I ever would have. He made me sing back-up parts that were much more complicated than anything I would have come up with, so I think he made me more sophisticated musically by introducing me to more sophisticated musical ideas. He made me sing a lot louder than I would have naturally because he’s got a much stronger voice than mine so there were a lot of vocal acrobatics that I needed to learn how to do in order to keep up with him.”
Rufus also helped to get his sister a role in the new Martin Scorsese movie, The Aviator, singing the old Bing Crosby/Liberace chestnut I’ll be Seeing You. “Rufus had gotten the role and he was on set and they asked him if he knew a female singer that could do a song from the Forties and he suggested me,” she relates. “They were shooting in Montreal and my mom was there knitting behind Marty [Scorsese]. She got in her old beat-up car and went and got a photo of me and a recording of me singing Bye Bye Blackbird. She showed it to the music people, apparently prayed to God, and I got the part sight unseen 20 minutes later.”
The close relationship between Wainwright and her brother is evident when they share the small stage at the Mercury Lounge in New York for a somewhat ironic rendition of their father’s One Man Guy, along with another product of a dysfunctional folk family, Teddy Thompson, son of Richard and Linda Thompson. As they harmonise on this ode to selfishness, it’s clear that they’re trying to rewrite their legacy on their own terms.
“I know Sean Lennon and Paul Simon’s kid and that’s got to be really difficult,” Wainwright says, laughing. “I think you need to think that you’re going to be able to sell more records than your parents. I think that’s really important.”
- Martha Wainwright’s UK tour starts on Monday at Camden Barfly, NW1 (0870 9070999). Her single Factory is out on March 21 and self-titled album on April 4, both on Drowned in Sound
