It’s a shame that Martha
Wainwright is blessed with such hypeworthy DNA. There are many
other interesting, even important things to say about the
Brooklyn-based, Montreal-reared singer/songwriter, but her genes
won’t cooperate. Demanding obeisance, they elbow their way
into the listening experience and prevent us from hearing things we
might have noticed if we didn’t already know that she’s
the sister of the extravagantly gifted pop visionary Rufus
Wainwright and the daughter of celebrated folkies Kate McGarrigle
and Loudon Wainwright III. Her family tree casts a long shadow, and
it’s easy to understand why she waited until she was 28 years
old to release her debut full-length, why she spent years singing
backup for her brother and making cameos on other people’s
records, why she self-released three EPs before signing to a record
label with decent marketing and distribution. A distinguished
bloodline is a blessing, but, as Jakob Dylan surely would attest,
it’s a mixed one.
Fortunately, Wainwright is up to the
challenge. Spectacularly foulmouthed and surprisingly tender, she
demands to be confronted on her own terms while effectively
exploiting the complexities of her unique life story. Like both her
parents and, to a lesser degree, her brother, Wainwright is a
confessional songwriter whose art finds expression in the tangled,
often uncomfortable truths gleaned from personal experience. The
album’s emotional centerpiece, “B.M.F.A.” (it
stands for something that made the suits at Rounder — and at Illinois Times —
nervous, so they abbreviated it), is, by her own admission, about
her father, who left the family when Martha was small. Loudon fans
may cringe on his behalf, but they should remember that he wrote
several not-entirely-flattering songs about her, including one
about slapping her thigh.
“B.M.F.A.” is brutally, outrageously
direct, but, like Sylvia Plath’s seminal poem
“Daddy,” it’s not so much an attack as an affirmation
of self: “You have no idea how it feels/To be on your own, in
your own home/With the f****** phone, and the mother of gloom in your
bedroom/Standing over your bed with her hand on your head.” As
her voice escalates in intensity, she stops feeling sorry for herself
and exults in her anger: “I will not pretend, I will not put on a
smile/I will not say I’m all right for you when all I wanted was
to be good.” She repeats the titular epithet enough times to
quash any hope of future airplay, but FCC-baiting profanity isn’t
what makes this song so brave. Whereas Alanis Morissette and other
contemporary drama mamas have capitalized on the cathartic
possibilities of female rage, Wainwright explores the more interesting
outer reaches of her emotional range, confronting her own ambivalent
desires and investing even the most venomous declarations with a
bittersweet sympathy.
Although it’s easy to identify family
resemblances — the lacerating honesty of Loudon, the
tremulous grace of Kate, the larger-than-lifeness of Rufus —
Wainwright combines these influences into a sound so original that
it defies mere biology. Hoarse, exuberant, terrified, and
terrifying, she might just as well be the love child of Edith Piaf
and Bob Dylan. Her voice swoops and shrieks, a cigarette-seared
yowl that erupts into unexpectedly virtuosic glissandos, subsides
in weary sighs, and crackles like a telephone line in an electrical
storm. Incorporating 19th-century parlor songs, French chanson, cabaret, and
confrontational rock & roll, Wainwright creates a folk music
for the 21st century, one that can encompass both the blistering
sexual politics of “Ball and Chain” and the delicate
heartbreak of “Don’t Forget.” It’s a rare
and magnificent achievement, and you can bet that even the BMFA
himself is proud.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2005.
