hile a gap of five years between albums might seem to be an extended break for a musician who had released four albums in the previous eight years, in Martha Wainwright’s case the hiatus was hardly what you would call a holiday. After going through a marriage breakup in New York City, Wainwright not only moved back to her hometown of Montreal but also decided to buy a building in a suburb where she once lived and open a café. The basement of Café Ursa then became a studio for the new album, Love Will Be Reborn, which features the most original songs from the singer since her 2012 album Come Home To Mama. Wainwright, who plays guitar and piano (for the first time) on the new album enlisted Toronto musicians Thom Gill on guitars and keyboards, drummer and percussionist Phil Melanson and Morgan Moore and Josh Cole on bass to record the album with producer Pierre Marchand, who might be best-known for his collaborations with Sarah McLachlan and his production of Martha’s brother Rufus’s second album Poses as well as Martha’s mother and aunt’s record, Heartbeats Accelerating. When we catch up on Zoom to talk about the new album it is early evening in Montreal, church bells are chiming in the background and Wainwright has just left her café after running a creative pottery camp for children. “It’s been a really different time,” says Wainwright when I ask her of the last half decade of her life. “There’s been some touring in Quebec, in Canada, but it’s really been buying this building, transforming it into this space with friends and family, into this little community center and then booking shows and running it. That’s a whole learning curve, and then making a record and finishing this book that I’ve been working on for a really long time. Then COVID happened.” In the past few months, the café has been able to have customers back and the kids camp has added to the activity. “I live around the corner from the cafe,” continues Wainwright, “but this is near where I grew up in a way. My mother had bought a building 25 or 30 years ago, that I lived in. Then I went out to New York and was in New York for almost 20 years and then I realized I wanted to come back to Montreal and face what was here, and what was left for me here. I wanted my kids to go to school in French and to know my family that I grew up with. So, it was a big change and it was a return, a coming home, and putting down roots for the first time ever, because as a touring artist, it’s hard to do that. It’s also rewarding in a way, but it is a struggle. It’s like there’s two parts of me, but I just have to also embrace it. I think also with the pandemic, we all had to sit in our own homes and neighborhoods, and family, and with the people that we’re with, and face it a little bit, and make adjustments accordingly.” As the title of the new album suggests, Wainwright has undergone a personal reinvigoration. “Obviously, I am now middle-aged, deep middle age, I just turned 45 in May,” she says, “and that is one of the themes I suppose but it’s not really about that - although there is a song called ‘Getting Older’. But there’s a lot of light after darkness. There’s really almost an A side and a B side on this 20
record. There are songs that I generally steeped in a little bit of - or quite a bit of - anger and fear, and disappointment, coming out of a bad divorce and not being able to have access to my kids, and lots of pain and strife around that, and fear. Then, unexpectedly, also being free of something that wasn’t good, maybe, and then more unexpectedly, a new love, which was surprising. Then these new beginnings, like Ursa and things like that. So, it seems like, very much a shedding, dare I say it, of an old skin.” Part of shedding the old skin has involved writing a memoir and, if it is anything like her songs – which are openly honest – it should be quite revealing. She started working on it seven years ago and recently decided to finish it. “It’s called Stories I Might Regret Telling You, if that says anything about it,” explains Wainwright. So, it’s quite personal, of course, because that’s how I write. I only write about myself because I don’t feel equipped to write about much of anything else. Then everything changed and it went a little upside down in my personal life, and I had to stop writing it because it was clear that it couldn’t be published, because it was altered, everything was different. “So, I’m just glad to have done it, it’s more in the final process. The editor has finally gone through it and done her damage or her work, but I appreciate the work she’s done. So, we’re proofreading it and I’m totally over it. I’m so tired. I was contracted to write 80,000 words; I must’ve written 500,000. I mean, I wrote it and rewrote it, and threw it out, and burned it, and rewrote. So, I’m pretty over it, but it’s been an albatross and, hopefully, it doesn’t feel like that or read like that - but it might.” I suggest that songwriting for the new album must’ve come as a relief after the experience of having to write her memoir. “Absolutely!” agrees Wainwright, “and with music, four minutes, poetry - is a nice setting, to be able to say things.” Love Will Be Reborn was started in the Café Ursa’s basement but finished remotely in producer Marchand’s own studio. “We had been open for a few months,” explains Wainwright, “and then there was some time where nothing was happening, no shows were booked. So, I turned it into a recording studio. I had five or six songs written by that point, or maybe a little more, and tracked them. I really loved what I heard, but I also realised that I wanted a producer and didn’t really want to produce it myself, because it’s hard to do that. This seems, to me, to be an important album because it had been a long time since making a record. “So, I contacted somebody who I had always wanted to make a record with, but he was not available or too expensive, it never quite worked out. That’s Pierre Marchand, who produced my mom [Kate] and Anna’s comeback record, their Heartbeats Accelerating, which is a record that they released after eight years of not making a record and a record that they released at my age. So, there were some parallels there. I met Pierre when I was 14, and I came to him at 44 and asked to do this and he liked the idea. So, then he took what I had done, and then we went into his studio, which has more controlled sound. Then COVID happened and we were able to finish it remotely. He was 100 kilometers away but could control the computer in
his other studio from where he was, and we did it that way, and got it done. So, it was amazing.” Some of the music on the album sounds so free flowing and spontaneous it is as though Wainwright worked it up with the band in the studio. “Yeah, that’s possible,” she agrees. “I write all the songs by myself because that’s how I do it. I’m quite shy, and so I play the guitar at home and sing, and then just construct a song. Then normally, I would have gone out and play the song by myself, a lot, and I did with a couple of songs, like ‘Love Will Be Reborn’ and ‘Body and Soul’, but the other ones, I didn’t really get an opportunity to play live. So, I brought them to the musicians and having worked with them before, I wanted their input and their sensibility somewhat. We worked it up, we would just jam. Everything was recorded live on the floor, and we would jam on the song for several hours, and then try and get a take.” “That’s the first time I’ve ever played the piano,” admits Wainwright when I mention the song ‘Falaise de Malaise’. “I don’t play the piano generally. I’m not a piano player but I’ve been playing around with that melody on that little piano part for a long time, because it was just in my head. I have a piano in my house, and so every once in a while, I’d sit down and go, ‘Martha, you really should try harder.’ The piano is really hard, especially, any instrument, learning it as an adult is really hard and I feel guilty about not playing the piano. I feel bad about it because so many people around me are great piano players, and I work a lot with piano players, and so I’m very aware of what they can do and what I can’t do.” The title song, ‘Love Will Be Reborn’, was written in London five years ago when Wainwright was staying at a friend’s house and going through a dark time. While her friend suggested they write together, Martha actually ended up penning the entire song herself. “It’s the first song that I wrote for this record,” she explains. “I was on tour with the band, these musicians that you hear on the album, promoting Goodnight City, which was my last record. It was just an absolutely very difficult, very difficult time, and very scary, and really at a low. I was at the highest point of divorce drama, and court, and I was on the road and I couldn’t take my kids, and I just felt really scared, although I was having a great time playing with these great new young musicians, who were really bolstering me up, who were really helping me get through.” “I sat down and that song, it just came out of me, through tears,” she recalls and adds that she had sent her friend and his partner off to the pub so she could dabble and come up with something and by the time they returned the song was finished. “It was just really positive too. In a way that was just like this idea that out of bad will come good. I was just totally overwhelmed and it never happens that the songs come out quickly. It was quite simple, the lyrics were easy to write. “I would play at a lot of shows. The song is saying that everything’s going to be okay and then things got better. I met somebody else and it was totally great. So, it was interesting. It was really, really helpful, the song was a real gift, it felt like a gift.” Love Is Reborn is available now through Cooking Vinyl.
