She's still wild at heart
Singer/songwriter Wainwright's new album comes from a period of strife
It's official, says Martha Wainwright. On her new album, Love Will Be Reborn, she says goodbye to her youth.
“I think that it's something that takes a while to accept, especially when you're in a business like the music business which is so geared to youth and freedom, that freedom that comes with youth,” says the 45-year-old. “I'm still very spirited. I dress oddly and behave silly sometimes and get to be wild still. But at a certain point, you kind of accept and start to think about this new other more mature person.”
Love Will Be Reborn is the singer/songwriter's fifth album and one that comes out of a period of strife. Following the release of her 2016 album, Goodnight City, Wainwright went through a divorce she calls “devastating.” It took her a while to get back into the songwriting groove. The title track snapped her out of her funk.
“It just flew out of me very quickly, which doesn't happen often. I think maybe because it was because I was in somebody else's house and away from the fuzzy cage of my own.”
The song, she says, was “almost like a prayer, or mantra.
“It was the thing that was going to help me to stay strong. It was about `It's going to get better, it's going to be better.' So I really held on to that concept.”
Hole in My Heart and Getting Older, too, are hopeful, and about renewal and the excitement of new love; the former concludes with a euphoric chant of “crazy love.” Wainwright has never been afraid to go to dark places in her music, though. The tortured Report Card is about missing her children, presumably in the aftermath of the divorce. In Justice, the narrator asks “Justice, where are you?/i'm waiting/you'll find me in the Garden of Eden/i'm not sinning, I'm just singing.”
There are some emotions she can write about in her songs that she decided didn't belong in her memoir, which is scheduled for a March 2022 publication.
“In the songs, I can touch on things that I wrote down in the memoir, but that I needed to edit out for legal reasons and also just for reasons of not wanting to get bogged down by negativity. With the songs, it's important to be able to say how you feel.”
Listening to Love Will Be Reborn and in conversation with Wainwright, it's easy to hear the fiery youngster who came to international attention for the first time on The Mcgarrigle Hour.