The rebirth of Martha Wainwright

"It's a coming home, in a way, to music."

Martha Wainwright sits in front of her computer in her Mile End Montreal home, talking over Zoom after getting her two kids settled in the room next door. The folk-rock songwriter hasn't released an album of entirely original material since 2012's Come Home to Mama, and Love Will be Reborn, released Aug. 20, is a welcome return to the personal. Over the past near-decade, Wainwright has seen a lot of change, including moving her family from New York City into the home of her late mother, Kate McGarrigle.

But in 2016, at the tail end of releasing the collaboration album Goodnight City, Wainwright's marriage to producer Brad Albetta "fell apart," and the fallout was swift and traumatic.

"It's been a really difficult and complicated and messy separation and divorce…. And that was really kind of shocking and surprising because I had been through other things like my mom's death or my eldest son being born quite premature. And it just sort of didn't seem as hard."

Following the separation, Wainwright didn't write very much. Things were "kind of depressing and dark," as she describes, but over time little snippets of songs would appear here and there, and they patiently accumulated.

"The songs [on Love Will be Reborn] are autobiographical in many ways, but they're a little less, I find, navel-gazing, and maybe that's just my age now," she says, smiling. "But it's just a little bit more on a broader perspective of themes of life and death, and time and trust and lack of trust, and parenthood and all of these things that sort of seem like a much bigger, broader, perspective and a deeper, more layered life."

She wrote the album's first song in 2017, which fittingly became the title track. It was a hopeful burst in a time of uncertainty, when Wainwright had been on the road for months and hadn't seen her kids in a long time. She wasn't sure what the custody situation was going to look like when she got home. 

"Surprisingly, ['Love Will be Reborn'] is strangely and oddly really hopeful and was sort of a little gift," she says. "I wrote it, but it was as if somebody else had kind of climbed inside ... and [went], 'It's going to be OK,' or 'This will get better,' or 'There will be love.'"

You can hear Wainwright's hope in the recording, the guitar gentle, the drums uplifting. "I cried only one tear for us today/ and I will wipe it away before the day breaks/ and there is love in every part of me I know/ but the key has fallen deep into the snow/ so when the spring comes I will find it/ and unlock my heart to unwind it," she sings in the first verse, the complication of a happy future and the heaviness of the past weighing in simultaneously.

That dichotomy, of almost crippling heartbreak and the hope of a new, but different, life, fills every corner of Love Will be Reborn. "Body and Soul," one of the more devastating songs on the album, is the second song Wainwright wrote. Its first verse paints a vivid scene that the singer explains she needed to create to draw out her deeper feelings, where fact and fiction blur but the horror is the same:

Run to the chapel, light up every candle
I fall to my knees, I say "God please," what can I do? 
Ninety seconds later, both hands 'round my neck I plead, "Oh Man take your hands off," what can I do?
I've got an 800 number I like to call, I've got an 800 number I like to call
They ask me if you caused the fall 
Instead I tell them my dream.

"I feel like I needed to say that this had happened, you know? I feel like I needed to [Wainwright pauses, collecting her thoughts] find a way to express some of the deep fear and feeling of abuse that I have felt, because it was really powerful and really strong and it was psychological more than anything, you know. But of course, the idea, in a lot of these songs, is that the outcome is a positive outcome and that I've got my body and soul. You cannot take that away from me. And it was really important for me to be able to say that in the description of some of it."

"This is all in retrospect," she continues, "but setting up the song to have this image of someone running into a church with their hands around them, falling on their knees, a woman who's a victim, which is something we've seen over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And that's how it felt when [my divorce] was happening to me. I was like, 'Oh, my God, I am just — like it's not as bad for me as it is for a lot of women — but it's happening. And I think that was shocking."

While Wainwright was touring over the last few years, in the time between Goodnight City's release and Love Will be Reborn's existence, these first two songs buoyed her, whether she was on the road putting on a brave face, or at home dealing with reality.

"They are the things that I carry with me," she says. "They are kind of these shields or a bow and arrow, I don't know which one, but they are my accoutrements in my life. And they do help me and they protect me."

'My record is less depressing, which is kind of amazing'

Wainwright is the same age now (45) as her mother was when Kate and Anna McGarrigle released 1990's Heartbeats Accelerating, which Wainwright calls "a real middle-aged record," when she and her brother, Rufus, were in the midst of leaving home. 

"My record is less depressing, which is kind of amazing," says Wainwright, laughing, while comparing the two albums, made by women in their 40s dealing with profound change. Another thing the two records have in common is their producer, Pierre Marchand, who also produced Rufus's 2001 album, Poses (on which Wainwright guested). Wainwright had wanted to work with Marchand since Heartbeats Accelerating, but many reasons surfaced against it: she couldn't afford him; it wasn't the right time; it wasn't the right project. Her ex-husband is also a producer, and he worked on some of her past albums. But at this moment in particular, she felt it was time.

"There's a lot of parallels [between Love Will be Reborn and Heartbeats Accelerating]. I mean, there's so many parallels with [Kate] in my life. And we are not that similar in many ways, it's not exactly that. But there are definitely work parallels and life parallels, some better, some not so great. But there's a femininity, there's a woman's experience that I think Pierre is really good at being sensitive to…. And I felt I kind of deserved that. So I was like, 'I'm gonna blow all my budget on Pierre.'"

Wainwright considers Love Will be Reborn to be her "Canadian record." Being back in her home province of Quebec, where Marchand is also from, while making a home with her children in her mom's old house. ("It's really becoming more my house, which I think is interesting," says Wainwright. "And I mean this in the really slow, honestly organic way, like a tree growing.") The songwriter bought and opened a café in her neighbourhood in 2019, called Ursa, where live performances have been happening (outdoors) during the pandemic. She's also just finished writing her memoir, which is something that's taken her "seven f--king years" and which she says is the hardest thing she's ever written. The title track of her album also came true, and Wainwright did find love again. But that balance, of building the present while living with what's happened in the last few years, still weighs on her.

"It does make you feel a little bit always off kilter," says Wainwright. "Why aren't I enjoying this? I should be happy, you know, like I have this great new partner who's nice, kids are doing OK. You know, I get to see them this week or whatever, but then there's always this kind of [mumbles quietly, like a voice whispering in the background]. But I will say that time is making the good win out. And seeing these songs makes me happy."