Charlotte Martin's Debilitating Illness Leads to Album and Baby Daughter

Posted on Mar 11th 2011 4:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Some husband-and-wife rock duos can make beautiful music together, while others can just plain drive each other crazy. Singer-songwriter Charlotte Martin admits that she and her producer husband Ken Andrews (formerly of the band Failure, among others) were in the latter pair. "When we did 'On Your Shore,' we almost killed each other," she tells Spinner. 'I think I was the first female he ever worked with and we were dating so we weren't exactly on the most solid terms. He's a bit older than I am and I probably wasn't ready to settle down. We had all sorts of weird dynamics."

The pair survived that experience and now Martin says they're way past bickering. "We've been together 10 year, married for five and we have kids and we just don't have time to argue about it anymore," she says, admitting that her husband was a great influence on her latest album, 'Dancing on Needles.' "I have to give Ken most of the props on this record. Yes, I wrote it; yes, I played piano on it; yes, I did the vocals on it, but the sound of it is all him. 'Dancing on Needles,' 'Volcano,' all of that. The only one I had any stamp on at all production-wise is 'Language of God' and you can tell cause I'm into that tribal Kate Bush thing. The rest of it was all him and it's very different."

Naturally, Martin has a lot of faith in her husband's talent. "Ken and I work so well together, he knows what I like and he's kind of at the top of his game," she says. "He can build these giant soundscapes for artists. People hire him, especially singer-songwriters, and he can just build the entire sound because he plays everything, mixes everything and he's a writer."

But that wasn't what led Andrews to basically take over the sonic reins of 'Dancing on Needles' -- it was a debilitating illness called intercostal neuralgia, which causes pain in the muscles between ribs, that is chronicled through much of the album. As Martin describes, it was everywhere during the recording. "I was just too sick to do it and I was too sick to care on this one," she says. "I just left him and Fern, my drummer, in the studio and was like, 'You guys have it, I'm gonna go throw up. Later.' I couldn't even sit through a session. My mind wasn't there, I couldn't do it. I just had no opinion really except 'til the very, very end."

"It's been a really horrible year and a half, very painful," she adds. "I couldn't lift my son, I couldn't drive, I couldn't cook, I couldn't empty the dishwasher. I basically got up, took pills and prayed they worked. Most of the time they didn't. Once that nerve would flare up, it's like being struck by lightning and your whole body just gets sick. I would throw up and get the chills because the pain was so intense."

Thankfully, her story has a happy ending, on top of the album -- Martin just gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Stella. "Underneath all of that pain, I'm a healthy person and able to get pregnant with a healthy baby," she says. "There is some good that is going to come out of this nightmare. I wanted another baby more than anything."

Charlotte Martin's 'Volcano' Video

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