In many ways, with the release in August 2021 of her sixth studio album, Love Will Be Reborn, Martha Wainwright was beginning again. Not just restarting things after the forced lockdowns imposed by COVID but reintroducing herself as Martha Wainwright, a mature, divorced mother of two sons finally getting on with life. And for all the trauma of the years that led to the album, the loneliness, the hurt, she could now also sing of joy, a new life, a new love, a new optimism.
It had been five years between albums and though those five years had been to say the least difficult, Martha had still managed to write. The album’s optimistic title song, Love Will Be Reborn, poured out of her one night at a friend’s home in London “in its entirety within ten or fifteen minutes,” she explains. “I was bawling… There were several years where I picked up the guitar, and I was so, so sad and depressed. I would just put it down because it was terrible.”
Back in Montreal, using the basement of the café bar, Ursa, which she’d opened in 2019, as a studio recording space, Martha enlisted a trio of Toronto musicians and, in a beautiful kind of closing of the circle, producer Pierre Marchand, who had produced several of albums recorded by her late mother, singer-songwriter Kate and her aunt Anna McGarrigle, as well as her brother Rufus’s second album poses.
In May 2022, a year after releasing Love Will Be Reborn, Martha published her memoir, Stories I Might Regret Telling You, in both English and French. To accompany its release, she released a digital deluxe edition of Love Will Be Reborn that includes five new songs that she had written about in the memoir, four of them her interpretations of songs written by her family – her father Louden Wainwright III’s ‘Thanksgiving’, Rufus’ ‘Dinner At Eight’, and her mother Kate’s ‘Tell My Sister’ and ‘Go Leave’. The other track is a “reimagined” version of ‘Love Will Be Reborn’.
With the arrival of a new year, it’s time to return to the concert stages of the world with her band – pianist Edwin de Goeij, bass player Morgan Moore, drummer Tommy Crane and saxophonist Nicolas Deslis – to present those new songs, the expanded Love Will Be Reborn and the songs from her storied back catalogue that still mean so much to her and to her fans.
“Similarly impressive was her virtuosic use of vocals as musical shading, adding texture and timbre, effortlessly switching gear between a hushed whisper and melismatic yodel,” Stephen Dalton added in his review for The Standard.
“I can’t deny myself the need to express myself,” Martha admits. “As a songwriter, I have to be able to express myself.” And for that, we can all be forever grateful.