Martha Wainwright delves into the pain of divorce—and the beauty of hope—On Love Will Be Reborn
The Montreal-based singer-songwriter brings her tour supporting her new album to the Massey Theatre
Martha Wainwright is touring again for the first time in about three years. Photo by Gaëlle Leroyer
Massey Theatre presents Martha Wainwright: Love Will Be Reborn on November 16 at 7:30 pm at the Massey Theatre.
MARTHA WAINWRIGHT IS surrounded by a pile of high-school applications for the eldest of her two sons at her home in Montreal when Stir connects with the singer-songwriter by phone. She’s getting ready to launch the West Coast leg of her Love Will Be Reborn tour, and as someone who travels a lot for work and who is also a single mom, that prep includes tasks such as getting her kids’ winter clothes ready and paying bills before she leaves.
“It’s a real juggle,” Wainwright says. “I’m scattered a little bit trying to get a few things done before heading back out on the road. I definitely get concerned about my kids and worried, but I’m adjusting my schedule to be able to make it so I’m never gone for too long.
“I haven’t really been touring for last three years or so, so this is an adjustment period for my kids,” she adds. “Once I do it a couple of times, they’ll realize it’s okay. It requires a lot as a parent, because you’re just wanting to be present for school work, but at the same time it’s letting them understand—and me, too—that this is something that I want to do and I have to do. It’s so important. We sometimes forget maybe what life is about, and it’s partially about working and making a living, and for me that means putting records out. I have to keep going; I don’t know what else I would do for a job.”
Love Will Be Reborn is Wainwright’s fifth studio album. The 11-track release is her first since 2016’s Goodnight City and the first one featuring exclusively original material since Come Home to Mama from 2012. This next portion of her tour takes her from California to B.C., with a stop at New Westminster’s Massey Theatre. The album’s theme relates to what makes touring especially complicated for her these days, and that is her divorce from Brad Albetta, her former producer, spouse for 10 years, and father to her two children. (The kids, who are nearly 12 and seven years old, are with him when she’s on the road; she has since met someone new.)
She was in a very dark place for a long time because of split, experiencing the kind of deep grief that makes simply getting through a single day seem like a monumental effort. Although music-making is in her blood—her parents are folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle; her brother is prolific Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright—she was in no state to do much of anything, let alone compose, while facing the breakdown of her marriage.
“There was definitely a long spell where I’d be picking up the guitar and it was so bleak and so teary and so horrible and dark, I’d have to put the guitar down,” she says. “The songs on this record are pretty intense, like ‘Report Card’. I’d work on it for a little bit then put the guitar down, but I needed to find a way to say what I wanted to say—like how much I miss my kids and how lonely I am and how empty it feels. It took a while to be able to put that into words.”
In that stripped-down, emotionally raw track, Wainwright sings “Baby I was there for every second, I made your little bed, I washed your little head, I made what you were fed/but now I walk the empty floors, looking through these empty drawers and everybody knows it’s you I’m looking for”.
“It’s always important to talk about things that are hard to talk about,” she says. “Obviously I don’t want to have somebody else be the target of my anger, but in the songs I’m hinting at certain things that have occurred. Music in many ways—in a three-minute song and in poetry—is a place where I feel you can have the freedom to express yourself, and that really needs to happen.”
Martha Wainwright wrote “Love Will Be Reborn” in about 15 minutes. Photo by Camilla Lundbye
Getting to the point of being able to compose anew in the first place—and to come out of the darkness—all started fairly suddenly one night when she was visiting friend Ed Harcourt, a singer-songwriter based in England. He had invited her over to write together, and she admits she was feeling nervous, seeing as how her creative process typically never involves other people; she prefers to write when she’s alone and hone a new piece before sharing it with the world. Soon after she arrived at his place in London and he suggested they get to work, she asked him to go out for dinner with his family so she could get started solo.
Within about 15 minutes, “Love Will Be Reborn” was born. She sings: “There is love in every part of me, I know/ But the key has fallen deep into the snow / When the spring comes I will find it, and unlock my heart to rewind it.” (Check out the video below, which features her two sons; the eldest had been reading King Arthur at the time, and the sword-wielding pair can be seen in a forest through which Wainwright wanders in a cape while carrying a troch.)
“This song just came flowing out of me through tears,” Wainwright says. “I was bawling, but I could hardly write fast enough to get the words down, and that never happens. When he came back I said, ‘Okay, I’m done; thank you.’ It became a mantra for me at that time to help me get through. I had this unexpected positivity and hopefulness. I’m so used to writing songs by myself in my apartment that maybe being outside of my house triggered something in my brain to be open to the possibility of hopefulness and change,” she says, adding with a laugh: “From now on I’m going to be breaking into people’s homes and writing songs in the middle of the night.
“Talking about divorce and my children and to an extent this new relationship on my record has sort of allowed me to move past in some ways, to take a look to the future and think of what the next five to 10 years will look like, to let go of some of that trauma,” she says. “I’m glad to be doing that, to be airing that out.”
Her sound and style have evolved, and while her edge is ever-present, her new album has a playful side too. Consider the lightly bouncy “Hole in My Heart” where Wainwright sings, “I got naked right away when I saw you / My love was like the rain when I saw you”.
Overall, the release evokes a gentler sensibility for the artist. Wainwright recorded Love Will Be Reborn in the basement of her new café, Ursa, working with Toronto musicians Thom Gill, Phil Melanson, and Josh Cole and producer Pierre Marchand. Marchand, who is perhaps best known for his work with Sarah McLachlan, is someone she had wanted to work with for a long time.
“I think I graduated in a way to a different sound,” Wainwright says. “On my last records, you can really hear my aggressive songwriting; it’s still here, but the songs have a softness and lightness to them. It’s a nice combination, and Pierre was able to express the songs in a way I would not have been able to. I probably would have been more confused or all over the place. He has a clarity and a beautiful way of dealing with the voice and the vocals.”
There seems to be a softening in other areas of Wainwright’s life. Relationships with and among her immediate family have always been fraught and complex. Her brother told the Independent last year that he and his dad had periods where they literally almost killed each other, while she wrote a song about her father called “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole”. Rifts and rivalry with her brother go back to her earliest days, and growing up they fought about practically everything. Fast forward to their mother’s passing in 2010, and the two have become much closer.
At the time of Stir’s interview with Wainwright, she had just seen her father and brother for the first time since before the pandemic.
“They both came to Montreal; it wasn’t planned,” Wainwright says. “It was really good. Maybe like a lot of us, we are coming out of this pandemic—and Rufus and I are fully middle-aged and dad’s getting older; he’s still working, though—and we’re sort of looking back a lot at things; there’s a kind of forgiveness.
“We don’t really have the same kind of anger,” she says. “Because we haven’t seen each other in so long, it’s ‘let’s try and make the best of it, make the most of the time we have.’”
Opening for Wainwright at the Massey is Bernice, featuring musician and songwriter Robin Dann and her longtime collaborators Thom Gill (keyboards), Philippe Melanson (e-percussion and drums), Daniel Fortin (bass), and Felicity Williams (voice). For more information, see Massey Theatre.
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