On the eve of her 49th birthday, Martha Wainwright was feeling introspective. A birthday eve on an album anniversary tour added another layer of reflection and memory, marking 20 years since the release of her self-titled debut album. The setting at the intimate Blue Strawberry music showroom and lounge couldn’t have been better for the thoughtful reminiscing Wainwright shared while tuning her guitar between songs. For the listeners packing the dinner tables with glasses of wine, cocktails, and the occasional salad or appetizer, the evening was an opportunity to learn more about Martha Wainwright—how she felt when she wrote the songs once upon a time, how she feels revisiting them after more than two decades of life experience, and the lessons she’s learned about herself along the way.
Martha Wainwright, the album, is a collection of songs Wainwright developed over the course of several years, while Martha was performing as a vocalist with her brother, Rufus Wainwright, trying to establish her own identity as a unique and talented musician emerging from the McGarrigle/Wainwright legacy. This stop on the commemorative tour featured most of the album’s original tracks, with a few additions of new material and cover songs, including a Rufus Wainwright song and a French-language cabaret song that was added to the bonus edition album.
Social mores have changed a lot over the course of those twenty years, and Wainwright sees it in her music. Looking back, she observed “These Flowers” puts people into boxes that were conventional wisdom at the time but have since been challenged as social rather than biological constructs. In a cosmic print romper, with spherical drop earrings swinging wildly alongside her face, Wainwright sang out: “And the boys they run faster / And they throw harder / And they get stronger … I wanna be like that.” In contrast, “And the girls they are pretty / And they get silly / When they get giddy.”
Wainwright paused thoughtfully for a minute after finishing this delicate guitar/piano-focused composition and talked about how puzzling those dichotomies were at the time. As a young adult, she felt a more masculine streak, struggling to fit into a box that was too small for a complex personality. Being part of a music scene in Montreal, being a younger creative in the orbit of her openly-gay older brother, Wainwright told us she hung out with a lot of queer friends at the time, though they “didn’t use that word much” back then. This particular reflection landed in a place of gratefulness that people today are freer to be themselves without pressure to conform to gender norms.
Adding further complexity, Wainwright told us the song at its core was inspired by being rudely awakened at the sound of children on a playground near her mother’s home. These days, Wainwright has children of her own, and revisiting the song at this stage of her life hits differently. Her own children now play on the same playground near the house she inherited after her mother’s death in 2010. The sound of playing children now reminds her when she’s forgotten to make their lunch. It’s a situation she never could’ve anticipated at the song’s moment of origin.
Next up: “And now a song about the heterosexual side coming out. And it’s angry.” Those familiar with the album tracks could chuckle at what was coming: “Ball and Chain.”
Wainwright performed with a solid band of musicians—upright piano and keyboard to her right, bass and vocals to her left, and exuberant drums from a St. Louis-native behind her—carefully arranged to fit on the shallow stage. They joined her for the first few songs, then took a table near the stage while Wainwright played a few songs solo, including a new song—“Wake Up in Makeup.” The piano player alone returned to his instrument to join Wainwright for a powerful delivery of “Dis, quand reviendras-tu?” originally performed by Barbara, taught to Wainwright by her mother and brother, allowing Martha to flex her immaculate French-Canadienne accent, honed over a childhood in Montreal.
We heard a few more family stories, such as the context around Rufus Wainwright’s “Dinner at Eight”—“more like dinner at 8:45” in Martha’s case, “flaky daughter” that she was—followed by a torch singer treatment of the song her brother wrote about their father, Loudon Wainwright III.
Digging deeper into her musical heritage, Martha treated us to a performance of “I Am a Diamond,” written by her late mother, Kate McGarrigle, and her two aunts, Anna and Jane McGarrigle. Part of a musical titled Missus Chadwick that was never produced, the song tells the story of a late-19th century grifter from Ontario who eventually died in prison after a mostly successful swindling career. To hear Martha tell it, the song was really about the sisters. “I am a diamond / In a setting that’s wrong / An unspoiled gem / That’s brilliant and strong / And I will find a way to take what is mine / ‘Cause I am a diamond / And I’m gonna shine.”
Hearing Martha tell these stories really drove home just how saturated with music her life has been since day 1: the McGarrigle sisters she sang with at an early age, the difficulty of finding her voice in the shadow of her brother’s spotlight, the need for some Wainwrights to exit the scene and make more room for her already…
Martha is clearly a branch on an uber-talented family tree, but her vocal and performance style are hers alone. She was inertia with a guitar and mic stand, bobbing and shifting, her face contorting to match or counter the constantly evolving sound of her voice, sometimes baby-like, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a pounding, as in the encore closer, “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” The effect was a delicate tantrum of her own design, unlike anything else to be found on that family tree. | Courtney Dowdall
