Culture That Made Me: Martha Wainwright on Bob Dylan, Annie Lennox and Succession
Martha Wainwright is one of the speakers at Galway International Arts Festival. Picture: Peter O'Sullivan
Martha Wainwright, 47, grew up in Montreal, Canada. She is the daughter of folk musicians Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle and a sister of Rufus Wainwright.
In 2005, she released her self-titled debut album Martha Wainwright, the first of six solo albums.
In 2009, she performed on her father’s Grammy Award-winning album High Tide & Handsome.
She published a frank memoir Stories I Might Regret Telling You last year.
- She is a guest speaker at this year’s Galway Arts Festival, 8.30pm, Tuesday, 25 July. See: www.giaf.ie
Listening to Broken English by Marianne Faithfull was the switch for me from preteen to real teen – when I went from Cyndi Lauper to Marianne.
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan on that record is an incredible track. In fact, every song on the record is great.
I've always been surrounded by a lot of female artists like the McGarrigles and Kate Bush.
To then be introduced to a different type of female voice, a different attitude, a different edginess, I was completely blown away.
It spoke more to my type of poetry – some of the anger, the edgy, stronger feelings that I was feeling inside me.
I seemed to be more connected to the type of song that she was singing on that record.
As a songwriter, I can't deny that I was pretty obsessed and listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.
It was always the thing that I went back to, an album like Blood on the Tracks.
If I was playing records throughout the evening with my friends and we were going in different places, in the end, if we wanted to top it off, or bring it down, it seemed all roads led to Bob Dylan.
He is the artist that all artists are led to.
One of the most powerful books I've ever read was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
The way that she created that memoir – it read like a novel, but of course it wasn't.
It was really remarkable the voice in that book. It was so moving.
I never got to see them perform, but as a teenager I heard about and saw some footage of The Residents. I was captivated by their anonymity concept.
They're not the first band to cover their identity, but I was really moved and surprised by that notion of The Residents because of their story, and how they were able to continue that story and obviously that their music is so incredible.
Their identity is this mystery, but at the same time it is completely identifiable.
As an artist, I’m such an open book. There's no artifice with me. There's no persona.
With folk music, oftentimes there isn't. I’m so envious in many ways of the power of anonymity, and creating a different persona, someone that can be mysterious.
I was jealous of their mysteriousness.
I had the opportunity when I was a kid to see a lot of big shows in Montreal because my mom knew the promoters in the city.
When I was about maybe nine, I got to see Pink Floyd doing The Wall tour.
Being in the stadium with all of these young teenagers and young adults around me smoking so much weed was just so amazing, people being really high and getting into it.
I remember my mom’s arm was wrapped around me to protect me in a way.
So I felt safe, but the ambience was also mind-blowing and obviously the light show was pretty amazing.
I listened to a lot of women singers as I was starting out.
To find your voice you have to try different types of voices and gravitate towards other great singers.
I remember singing those songs from Annie Lennox with the Eurythmics to myself over and over, just trying to capture that timber in her voice, and the band’s production and mood.
She was a really powerful influence.
A book that has stayed with me is The Master and Margarita by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov.
It’s surreal. An animal is speaking in it so it has sort of an Alice in Wonderland, psychedelic aspect to it.
Like a lot of Russian novels, it’s also got a political backdrop.
The concept of bigger ideas when you're a young person – these larger concepts of politics and humanity and as humans the mistakes that we've made – and our connection to that starts to be inspiring and interesting as you’re opening your eyes to the world.
It's not a love story about a boy meets girl, or about nature, it’s more about the human farce.
My dad is a very serious moviegoer. He likes really intense Japanese films. Not even Kurosawa.
He gravitates towards even more complicated films. My mom was a big film snob as well so we watched a lot of foreign movies and independent films together.
I remember when I was maybe 20 and I watched and really enjoyed the original Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky.
A slow, intensely slow film. Watching Solaris was really life-changing.
Discovering John Cassavetes and his films A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night was magical.
Opening Night is such an incredible movie. Incidentally, my brother Rufus is currently working on a musical based on a Cassavetes.
The freedom yet at the same time the complete control of Cassavetes enthrals me.
The TV series that stays with me that I watched recently, which I thought was pretty well done but grotesque, is Succession.
The acting is really amazing and it’s the complete creepiness of it.
How disgusting the rich are. We all knew it, but now we get to really witness it.
Who Killed My Father is a play I saw recently in Montreal. It was in French. It was absolutely amazing.
It was a monologue, and the monologue was someone who had memorised a book.
It’s an adaptation by Ivo van Hove of an incredible book by the same name – Who Killed My Father.
The book is by a guy called Édouard Louis. The acting in the stage play was an incredible feat.
It was two people on stage, but only one of them is talking for, like, several hours.
It was very impressive. It's very intense. It ain’t feel good. I thought it was remarkable.
