E-Mail This Article to a Friend Make way for Martha Another Wainwright enters the family business BY KEN MICALLEF
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"My dad has made a career out of writing great songs about people and kind of shitting on them," says Martha Wainwright, daughter of famed folkie Loudon Wainwright III. "So it is all fair game."

The 28-year-old singer-songwriter, who is also the daughter of folk-pop singer Kate McGarrigle and the sibling of Rufus, mentions her father in relation to her homonymous debut album, which is due out this Tuesday on Zoë/Rounder, and more specifically the disc’s big buzz song, "B.M.F.A.," which is short for "bloody mother-fucking asshole." Sounding like a pissed-off Loretta Lynn, Wainwright, who plays the Paradise Lounge this Wednesday, strums her guitar earnestly and sings, "Poetry is no place for a heart that is a whore." Her voice is sturdy and odd, not unlike her dad’s, and her lyrics sting with humor, insight, and wonder at the world. In short, the song frames Wainwright as a big talent wielding a mighty songwriting ax. Long before the punch line hits, "B.M.F.A" throws knockdown one-liners like "I wish I were born a man so I could learn to stand up for myself like those guys with guitars" and "I’ve been poked and stoked and it’s all smoked and there is no fire, only desire for you, whoever you are." The song builds into a series of severe scenes like "You have no idea how it feels to be on your own and the mother of gloom in your bedroom standing over your bed with her hand in your head." And it culminates in the profane declaration "you bloody mother-fucking asshole," which is repeated like some feel-good mantra. Wainwright claims that "B.M.F.A.," which audiences receive with great glee, is about her father and then again that it’s not.

"I didn’t tell people that it was about my dad for a long time," she recalls from her apartment in Williamsburg, New York. "It didn’t seem to matter. Then when I started telling people that on stage, it was more for a laugh. The song is based on an argument I had with my father, but it is not about my dad, it is more about me trying to explain myself and saying, ‘Here I am, doing the best that I can with what I have been given and it is hard.’ Performing it over time, it became much more serious and sort of a teenager’s anthem. Initially, those words came out in a very soft voice, almost being coy and funny. But then it became more serious as I internalized it more and more. It makes me feel good and it makes everyone feel good."

Wainwright’s debut was a long time coming. She sang back-up with Rufus for years, but mostly she sat around her apartment and watched a lot of daytime television. Then as she watched her brother’s career take off, Martha decided to enter the family business. And the songs rolled out of her as naturally as her daily sessions with Oprah. "A song like ‘TV Show,’ " she explains, "is about watching daytime television, which I spent years doing because I never really had a job. And it’s about Oprah telling me to love myself and me wanting really to believe her." "TV Show" is just one of the songs on the disc Wainwright wrote during her early to mid 20s, "a time where a girl deals with love and loneliness and trying to figure out who you are. Being in your 20s can be very free, but being that free is scary."

As far as role models go, Martha was surrounded by them in her family, where being a little crazy (her dad has a habit of making strange faces and tongue gestures during his performances) seemed to come with the territory of being a songwriter. "I watched and listened for a long time. I was inspired to write songs because my brother was getting so much attention; I wanted a piece of the action. And I had a lot to write about: the first song I wrote was about my father’s fourth child, who he had with someone other than my mother. You might expect it to be about strange dysfunctional family problems, but the song actually says, ‘One day we will love each other and learn to be a family.’ There was quite a lot of fodder to write something kind of interesting and emotionally complex. I was happy to find out that I had a natural poetic sense. Because Loudon and Kate and Rufus and everyone I grew up listening to were all very, very good. The bar was very, very high before I even started. That made me take the time necessary to make this album."

Recorded in Williamsburg with the Band’s Garth Hudson on two tracks with a band of studio ringers, Martha Wainwright is a refreshing respite from what’s become all too common among indie singer-songwriters who seem to think that creating a melancholy mood equals writing a good song — namely, an inability to sing in tune or play in time. Wainwright has inherited the ability to do both, along with a strong sense of self and an adventurous musical spirit. On her album, she’s as comfortable conjuring the dreamy pop mood of "Far Away," a song that splits the difference between Tammy Wynette’s roots and Beth Orton’s allure, as she is warbling like a female Dylan through "Factory." "Who Was I Kidding" is a ghostly lament that brings to mind a bruised young Dolly Parton.

When I liken her songs to hang-gliding in a thunderstorm, she concurs. "And you never know if you are going to stay up there or crash into the mountain. But that is how I feel, and generally when I sit down to write a song, I have to wait until I feel very strongly about something or very sad or lonely or scared or angry. When I am writing those songs, I am generally in that kind of a state. And I don’t mind telling people how I feel. It’s a relief to say things that I can get off my chest. This was all inside of me, and for a while I wasn’t sure if I wanted to fully expose it. But in the end, I needed to express a lot of stuff, and I don’t know how to type, so . . . "

Wainwright’s album is full of mood swings, from the angry release of "B.M.F.A." to the more æthereal "Far Away," with its cryptic lyrics ("I have been digging underground whatever remains is yet to be found" and "The dogs they bark and they bark, whatever happened to them all?"). Of "Far Away," Wainwright says, "It is like a horror film in a way. When you’re in a house in LA with the doors and windows open, you are very exposed to nature in a weird way that I’m not used to in New York City. You almost feel kind of exposed. The song is about God in the sense that I sing ‘Far away I hear your call and whatever happened to us all’ and ‘I know we have never met before but I need you more and more.’ When you don’t have religion, which I don’t, the world can be a strange and lonely place. You can see why people gravitate to organized religion for the solace."

"Factory" is even more puzzling. A beautiful tapestry of echoing guitars, brushed drums, and Mellotron buoy lyrics about taking "calls from factory to factory" with reflections like "I know a place I’ve seen a face." But as enigmatic as it seems on first listen, "Factory," like most of Wainwright’s songs, is grounded in reality. " ‘Factory’ refers to some music-industry types that I was around, and they made me feel uncomfortable and strange. I was in Oxnard, California, recording back-up vocals for one of Rufus’s records and wondering why I was there. Oxnard is a horrible place where these giant factories line a beautiful stretch of the Pacific Coast. I would walk the beach every morning and see all these factories. I had to get the hell out of there. All of my songs are about things I have actually experienced. Every single phrase relates to something that happened to me. What interests me is to take the reality of what has happened and express it as emotion."

Wainwright has embraced her family’s line of work and found her own way to get past the baggage that often comes with inheriting a famous last name. Although she dances around the issue of her father’s impact on her songwriting, there are some family legacies she just can’t escape. "Time stops when I am having a good show," she says, laughing. "I have a tendency to let myself go on stage, my head will fall back, and I will make these faces that perhaps you wouldn’t want to see on the cover of Vogue magazine. When you’re singing the same song over and over, it is important to find some emotional connection, especially when you’re trying to make a living being emotional. Unfortunately, I have inherited my father’s faces, and they do work better for men. But an expressive face is good. I figure when I am playing stadiums, at least they will be able to see me in the last row."

Martha Wainwright appears this Wednesday, April 13, at the Paradise Lounge, 969 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; call (617) 562-8814.