Also, check out a few recent articles from Australia on Martha (more coming):
The Age Melbourne Magazine named 'I Know You're Married But I Have Feelings Too' Album of the Month
"View From the Outside"
The Sydney Morning Herald
By: Bernard Zuel
April 19, 2008
"With this record I really wanted to go a little further."
On a cold London night Martha Wainwright is busy explaining her development from feisty woman-with-acoustic on her splendid self-titled debut to woman-with-rock-band on the marvellously titled new album, I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too.
Fear not ye censors and wowsers, the "going further" is not a sign of even more revealing material than the debut's signature tune, the father-baiting Bloody Motherf---ing Asshole. It is instead a reference to the album's fuller and more aggressively arranged sound.
The fact is that Wainwright has always been more of a pop-rock songwriter and performer, with an occasional French twist, than the folkish artist she is often labelled. It is a label which has more to do with her family background (daughter of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, sister of Rufus Wainwright) than the music itself.
And really, whatever she chooses to sing, from clear-eyed dissections of love affairs to favourite chansons, her wild creature of a voice, with its dips and soaring and vaulting runs, is the defining element. Well, the voice and a propensity for brutal self-examination and unedited commentary on others, from ex-boyfriends to family members.
However, this album has far fewer directly personal songs and some new hesitant steps into more political commentary, as seen through the eyes of a woman caught in the crossfire of the murky Iraq war.
"The songs that I wrote in my late teens and early 20s were very navel-gazing and I was really writing a lot of those songs without anyone noticing me - in the sense that it was almost reflection on my own life," the 32-year-old says, laughing at herself.
"I feel that as you get older [you] start to look outside yourself a little bit more and you become more interested in other people's problems and not only your own."
One thing we are not hearing in these songs is Wainwright the happily married and settled artist. She married musician Brad Albetta late last year but there's no sign of happy-clappy love songs - yet. It may be she doesn't want us to hear or is not yet comfortable writing about that person who is no longer fearful of not finding love.
"It's true that the main subject matter of my first record was unrequited love and that that no longer is the case in my life," she says. "But funnily enough, love is the subject that interests me the most and heartbreak can come from many different things, not only a relationship.
"I am probably a happier and more contented person and as an artist I think I've come to this record with more of a confidence in myself. It's almost like making a first album in the sense that I can just approach it as a singer, rather than someone who is trying to get out from underneath the shadows of her family."
Indeed, we've managed to get through most of this conversation with little reference to the family, something Wainwright is rarely afforded. But, having gone there, the question has to be asked about the song Hearts Club Band with its line "you always wrote a song a day and they're always words that made me want to say shut up".
To which family member does that refer?
"I think it's directed at maybe the general Loudon/Rufus/Kate thing," Wainwright says. "Loudon is always a subject in my life - for better or for worse - and I think that there is part of him in that song. But I think what I'm trying to explain in the song is that I'm someone who tries to live my life fully, led by their emotional state. And that will probably never change.
"I'm a lover of people and things; I'm very emotional about it. As someone who has always worn their heart on their sleeve, being a bit teary and all that stuff, if I am going to have to deal with the pain of that, I may as well be able to sing the praises of it, too."
Clearly, then, she lives by the Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney code: I'm a lover not a fighter.
"Oh, I fight, too," she says, laughing. "But in the end I make love.
A very Wainwright answer.
I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too is out on May 13th through Shock.
Link to see this article: http://www. smh. com. au/news/music/view-from-the-outside/2008/04/18/1208025453271. html?page=fullpage&035;contentSwap1
