Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Canadian singer and author Martha Wainwright is at home in Montreal, rehearsing with her family for an upcoming folk concert when suddenly it’s time for her interview with the Tribune. She retreats to her music studio upstairs where she can talk in peace.

Her busy schedule includes a trip to Galway next Tuesday when she plays Monroe’s Live at 8.30pm. That gig, part of the Arts Festival, will be preceded by a First Thought Talk at 4pm in the O’Donoghue Centre at the University of Galway.

“It’s what I do. It’s how I support my family,” she says about her musical career and her background, adding with a laugh “It’s too late for me to change now”.

The chances of Martha Wainwright becoming a singer were always pretty promising, although her journey to a successful solo career wasn’t straightforward.

Bloody Mother F***ing Asshole, which featured on her debut 2005 album, is a song she wrote about her father, the renowned American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Like her late mother, the equally renowned singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, he regularly performed in this part of the world.

Martha and her brother, Rufus, were raised with music on all sides, although it was mostly the music of their Canadian mother Kate and aunt Anna, a fantastic and much-loved folk duo.

Her parents divorced when she was very young after which Martha hadn’t a great deal of contact with her father. That changed in her teens – a period spent with him in New York while she was 14, while her mother was touring, helped inspire that brilliantly titled song.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.