Martha Wainwright Reimagines Edith Piaf for New Album, Tour

Posted on Jul 9th 2010 1:00PM by Laura Lanktree
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It's been a disorienting year for Martha Wainwright -- the Montreal-born singer/songwriter lost her mother (renown singer Kate McGarrigle) to cancer, went into labour early (thankfully delivering a healthy baby boy), and took up residence in a new and somewhat foreign home in Brooklyn.

Sitting in a French bistro in Toronto sipping a steaming latté, she tells Spinner, "I can't recognize anything around me, and I'm looking forward to being reminded of what it is exactly that I do."

Of course, music is what she does, and Wainwright's current tour of Europe and the UK should put her in a comfortable place. Her remarkable skill at performing onstage is evident in her new live disc, 'Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, À Paris,' which pays homage to legendary French singer Edith Piaf. Wainwright played three nights at New York's Dixon Place Theater for the recording, singing some of Piaf's lesser-known tracks. Her renditions uphold the integrity of the originals, but she also dusts them with her own magic.

Wainwright describes her voice as "really particular," but it lends itself beautifully to the heavy, emotive songs of Piaf's time. The intensity of her personal life also called for an emotional release, and she felt there was no better material to pour her heart into than French music.

"This s--- is really, really poetic, so it acquires this ridiculous emotive thing," she explains. "The way they describe things, like, 'I'm thrown and gutted by the wind and my soul' -- it's totally over-the-top, by English standards."

Wainwright also hopes that going on the road and performing these songs night after night will help her to get further inside them. "I think it's nice to be able to attach my own life to it," she says. "I'm not an actor and this is not a recreation of Piaf, so it's important for me as an artist to be able to feel these songs. That's probably why I picked these specific songs, because there was something in them that spoke to me."

While her performances aren't meant to conjure the tortured Parisienne's soul, Wainwright suspects Piaf's influence may have a lasting effect.

"I don't think people are necessarily going to be able to detect Piaf [in my music] from now on," she explains. "But at the same time I think that singing this [material] is really hard, and all of the things that you put your voice through must have an effect on how you can then use your voice later." More than anything, she hopes that this experience will influence her (already exceptional) songwriting, which has always been open and honest.

"I'm very revealing [in my songwriting] because I've always used my life as the fodder," she admits. "I like talking about serious things instead of the banal details of life because I end up being more interested in the more painful and disturbing aspects of it."

With heavy tracks like 'Bleeding All Over You' and 'Dis, Quand Reviendras-Tu?' in her own repertoire, it's somewhat surprising that if she were given the chance to choose one of her own songs for Piaf to cover, Wainwright would pick 'Bloody Mother F---ing A--hole.'

"That would be funny!" she exclaims. "You can sort of picture it because it's so emotive, but at the same time it would take her into a modern thing to be swearing like that, you know? I think that would be a trip."