Martha Wainwright will not object if you describe her as a little intense. Sometimes, says Wainwright, she writes songs that strike even her as terrifyingly off the deep end.
No matter how hard she tries, explains Wainwright, she just can’t get the hang of ironic composure. Don’t look for winks and asides in her songs – every shrieked chorus, every furious chord-change – gives voice to an ache that won’t go away.
“Unfortunately I’ve never been able to be quirky,” says the 29-year-old Montreal native, who speaks, like she sings, in a smoky croon. “The music that inspires me is emotionally over the top because, I guess, that’s the kind of person I am.”
Virtuoso musicians aren’t always born performers; naturally shy, Wainwright has watched her career proceed in baby steps.
Her debut album, Martha Wainwright, arrived last year but the songs it contains span a decade, relaying, in ardent detail, the story of her adolescence and young adulthood.
“Well, for a long time I had difficulty getting signed,” she says. “The songs were unconventional and record companies were reluctant to take a chance on me.” She pauses to sigh. “Yeah, it’s been a struggle.
‘Struggle’ is not a word normally associated with a performing Wainwright. Martha’s father, Loudon III, is a major figure in alt.folk circles; her mother, Kate McGarrigle one of the famous McGarrigle sisters. And, of course, she is the sister of Rufus, a singer whose velvet-crush torch songs evoke the sepia glory of the Brill Building.
“Touring with Rufus has helped me as a performer,” says Wainwright (she is part of his backing band). “Being up on stage with him I have gained confidence, and learned a lot, for sure.”
While her brother is notably prolific (his last project, Want, was a grandiloquent double LP), Wainwright confesses to writing at a treacle-slow pace. She prefers to compose at home, in quiet places, at quiet moments. To Wainwright, writing on the road is an anathema. She is, in fact, increasingly ambivalent about the concept of touring.
Playing live, she says, is emotionally exhausting, especially for a singer such as Wainwright, who brings a searing honesty to her performance.
“I’m starting to understand why superstars get so stroppy about seemingly tiny things – like why their bed doesn’t have the right sheets or why they haven’t got the correct type of bottle water. You know, you give up a lot to do this. It’s a sacrifice, being away from home, from the places you know.”
Wainwright’s songs flutter somewhere between hysteria and bottomless melancholy; there is brittle humour there, but the pitch, always, is high and with a dangerous edge.
On Martha Wainwright she lets fly at old boyfriends, and at her father, who walked out on the family when she was a toddler. Yet Wainwright insists any bitterness she feels towards him is largely subliminal, seeping out subconsciously between the cracks of her song-craft.
Her childhood recollections of Loudon are, she says, overwhelmingly warm: “I remember thinking very highly of him. He was this guy who’d come and buy us things in the summertime. He was very funny; Mom was the dragon-lady. I’d look forward to hanging out with him because we’d have canned spaghetti and ice cream.”
Tensions between father and daughter only really flowered as she took her first steps in music. Although extravagantly encouraging of Rufus (Loudon would enthusiastically circulate his demos among producer friends), he did little to support his daughter’s ambitions.
“I was writing songs in New York and drinking and being a fuck-up, and he literally did not take me seriously. He was like, ‘Aren’t you going to get a real job, or go to school?’”
Her struggle to secure a record deal was, she believes, born of her natural reticence. “I didn’t network. I walked away from a lot of deals because I wasn’t prepared to grovel sufficiently or pat people in the back or hang out in the right bars. But, hey, I got there eventually. “
Unlike the rest of the Wainwright clan, Martha possesses one notable talent – the ability to wildly thump a guitar as though something inside her was burning up.
“There’s one thing I can do which no one else in the family can do, which is rock. Rufus isn’t very good at rocking out – it’s like a joke when he tries to do it. But I like to really let go. I have a real flair for that, I think.”b

Martha Wainwright is out on Rough Trade. She appears on OTHER VOICES on RTÉ Two, Wednesday February 22nd.