by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“The thing with songs like ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ is that they’re really about the person who wrote the song.”

Martha Wainwright isn’t condemning herself with this statement, though her recently released eponymous album and the BMFA EP feature their fair share of lyrical self-flagellation. The singer-songwriter is admittedly trying to sidestep the fact that the song was inspired by her father, Loudon Wainwright III, as she recently revealed to several journalists. Such searing lyrics, and the raw ache in her powerful voice as she sings them, reflect overwhelming and often brief emotional surges, she says—they don’t capture the subject’s true personality or encapsulate the whole of her feelings about them, and the Wainwrights and McGarrigles clearly understand that.

“It’s a typically modern dysfunctional family, like most people’s,” she says. “We just happen to be a bunch of writers.”

From her mother Kate McGarrigle’s devastating “Go Leave” (about the end of her marriage) to Loudon’s “I’d Rather Be Lonely” (a jab at his then-teenage daughter) to his more lighthearted “Rufus Is a Tit Man” to Rufus’s sweet “Little Sister,” the family has a long history of reproaching and praising each other in song. The drive to air dirty laundry may not be genetic, but the tendency to expose emotions through singing, songwriting and performing is clearly learned.

“It can’t be a coincidence that both Rufus and I write very revealing songs,” she says. “I come by it naturally without knowing the potential repercussions of it, but I guess I’m willing to find out. Hopefully it won’t bite me in the ass too hard.”

Big Apple blues

Something that did bite Martha Wainwright in the ass, inadvertently kick-starting her adult life and her career in music, was her brother’s success. As a child, she sometimes sang with her parents and Rufus on stages in Canada and the U.S. Later, she began recording and releasing her own songs—in a review of her 1997 debut cassette, the Mirror called her voice, “a treasure that’s just begun to be tapped.” Then Rufus was signed to DreamWorks.

“[He] was getting a lot of, ‘Local boy does good’ kind of [attention] and I just wanted to be somewhere where that wasn’t around me,” she says.

Martha left her mother in Montreal for her birthplace, second home and current home, New York City. “I wanted to get out of Montreal just because I could, for fun,” she says. “[Montreal] was pretty dead, industry-wise, and I just wanted to walk down the street and be more anonymous.”

With high expectations for her new life and career, however, Wainwright had set herself up for disappointment. “I went to New York in the hopes of getting signed. I thought, because Rufus got a big record deal with an American label, that I could do the same thing, and I was wrong in a major way.”

Rock chick

Amid the major label mergers of the late ’90s, which had a slimming effect on all the companies’ rosters, not to mention the waning popularity of raw music of all kinds, Wainwright’s “unpolished” work wasn’t turning many corporate heads.

“No one would touch me,” she says. “In retrospect, I don’t think I tried very hard, and I wasn’t really ready. I spent those first five years in New York just fucking around, playing a lot of weird shows in dumpy places and hopefully defining who I was as an artist, and getting better.”

After singing backup for her brother for several years, live and on record (a favour he recently returned on “Don’t Forget” and “The Maker”), Wainwright finally signed with MapleMusic/Universal to release her proper debut album, a brilliant, diverse pack of passionate tunes. Inspired by the soft voices and traditional tastes of the McGarrigles, as well as her father’s Dylan-esque folk tendencies, Wainwright’s vocals and arrangements have a slightly rougher, tougher edge—she recently said she’s the only member of her family who can rock, a skill she attributes to her teenage “rock chick” heroes like Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith, as well as the punk scene she was exposed to in New York.

“My lifestyle and life became very difficult in a lot of ways, and that makes for harder, more angry music,” she adds. “One of the things my aunt Anna told me when I was young was, ‘Write about what you feel is true. If there’s a truth to it, it’s gonna to be good.’ It’s about being very connected to your heart, and not trying to be too clever. As a young woman in my twenties, I wrote songs about being slighted by guys and that kind of shit. I’m in my thirties now, so the next album may be about, I don’t know, mortgages and nappy-changing. It’ll be a surprise.”

At la Tulipe on Friday, June 10, 8:30 p.m., $16.50

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