Martha Wainwright sings and dances through the rain
“I Know Your Married But I Have Feelings Too”
Release date: 6.10.2008
By Jerilyn Covert
Take it from the man who’s been lauded by critics as the ultimate storyteller: “The story of who you are is never about you,” Rabih Alameddine writes in his new book “Hakawati.” Of this, Martha Wainwright is probably well aware. Daughter of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle and the sister of Rufus, Martha is definitely a person whose story has never been about her, but about her nepotistic relationships with members of her legendary family. As if accounting for this fact, Martha chose to focus her new album, “I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too,” outward, on the people in her life and the events happening all around her, unlike her more introspective eponymous debut. Throughout the album’s 14 tracks, she reflects on past friendships, on casualties of war, on her mother’s battle with cancer and on seemingly scads of former flames (let’s not forget the title, after all). Lines like this from “Comin’ Tonight,” however, take that outward focus to the brink of obsession: “I spend my time trying to forget you with/ Booze and smoke from cigarettes and dope/ I only seem to forget myself/ It’s only you that is left.” Martha was only 1 year old when her parents split up and her mother packed their bags for Canada. Growing up, she was a self-described “lazy student” who showed an interest in song and dance performances. But unlike her older brother, she did not have ambitions to be a star–at least not for a while. “I did initially rebel against joining the ‘family business,’ but I think it just came from a fear that I wouldn’t be good enough,” she told an interviewer for musicOMH.com. In another interview with Rolling Stone, she says, “The bar is really, really f**king high.” Yeah, no kidding. With folk legends for parents and a brother whom Elton John has called “the best songwriter on the planet,” it’s no wonder Martha feels the pressure to be great. A lesser artist might have succumbed under that kind of burden, but Martha Wainwright was determined to overcome it.
As tough as she is, Martha is also a very sensitive soul. Songs like “Bleeding All Over You,” which includes the anguished lyric that is the album’s namesake, and “Hearts Club Band” are emotionally driven. In “Bleeding,” the opening number, Martha laments a lost love who has since gotten married and had kids with another woman: “I can only talk about her for so long/ Then my mind turns into my heart/ And whispers into that dark cave that I’ve been wronged.” The “bleeding” current drifts easily into track 2, “You Cheated Me,” the unequivocal standout track, which offers an addictively catchy hook and the strikingly poignant image of keys left in the door on the night he left her for the last time. Certainly, part of Martha’s appeal extends from her willingness to be open with her deepest secrets and most painful memories. But her candor is successful only by virtue of her talent as a musician and a lyricist; she doesn’t just air out her dirty laundry, she refashions it into a tapestry of resplendence and poetry. Her honesty fits well with the earthy tone of the music, which is a kind of country-tinged folk sound injected, as in “You Cheated Me,” with a healthy dose of pop. Her voice fearlessly conquers all the pitch-perfect peaks and valleys of her melodies, moving from hazy whispers to loud moaning wails, from crystal clear notes to raw emotional grittiness.
It would be an affront to Martha’s multidimensionality to paint the image of her brooding and standing beneath a stormy rain cloud, and to ignore a brighter side of the album. After all, with a title as over-the-top as this one, you’d have to believe that she has a sense of humor. She casts herself as the other woman–the brokenhearted home wrecker–and the first song is essentially an indignant love letter to a married man. One can almost hear an objective bystander in the background, calling out, “Hey, crazy lady. Get over it!” But still, isn’t there something so quintessentially human about the vanity and vulnerability of it all? Because here, Martha isn’t raging against a person, per se, as much as she is taking ownership of the emotions that he inspired within her and that threaten to control her. (One must assume she has actually moved on, since she herself is now married to her bassist/producer Brad Albetta, a union that has been portrayed in the media as a happy and a healthy one.) In her songs, Martha is grappling with the feelings she has toward the things she can’t control: like her mother having cancer in “In the Middle of the Night” or the tragedies of war in “Tower Song” or her turning into her father in “Jimi” or even her own “sad nature” in “Niger River”: “You like people strong and free/ That’s not like me/ I’m caged in chains of my own sad nature.”
Several times throughout the album she uses this imagery of being shackled, caged or otherwise enslaved. This is a clue as to why becoming a singer-songwriter was so important to her–not so that she could prove herself to her parents or to the scrutinizing public, but because her music is her only means of catharsis and escape. She even writes a song about it, the song “I Wish I Were,” in which all her passion and her drive are simplistically conveyed in a way that only poetry could so perfectly express: “I wish I were a singer a dancer, dancing for your love.” Thus, while the story of Martha Wainwright may not be about her, it certainly culminates with her and the beautiful music that she writes while in the throes of seeking freedom, and while struggling to be understood.