Those of us layfolk who prefer to stay off the stage and out of the spotlight tend to forget that even professional performers can be plagued by thou-shalt-not monkey voices. In an interview with Canada’s QTV last year, Martha Wainwright admitted that several years into her career she reached a point where she needed to stop questioning her own abilities and just get on with the job.

“I think I realised that in order to get up every night and play in front of people requires a certain amount of confidence and belief in yourself,” she says. “So I made a concerted effort to try and accept the music that I was making and the lyrics that I was writing in order to move forward.
“Just now, right before you called, I was going through a video performance, I just made a live Edith Piaf record and we shot it, and so I’m faced with having to watch myself in high definition – which I think should never, ever have been invented – and I wasn’t able to hide behind gestures or trying to look pretty because I had to sing the songs as well as possible. And sometimes that requires a contorted face and things like that, so I’m forced to face the reality of what’s in front of me, and imagine myself looking at it from an outsider’s point of view, and trust that an audience will appreciate something in it.
“But I’m still hung up on what I look and sound like and what I’m saying in between songs. Interestingly enough, doing the Edith Piaf material, y’know, she’s a really great example of someone who sort of fell apart in front of people... and I think people appreciated it. Unfortunately for her, people like to see a certain amount of human fault.”
The Piaf record was produced by Hal Willner, who has over the last two decades co-ordinated an extraordinary sequence of themed albums whose subjects include William Burroughs, Charles Mingus, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Disney, Leonard Cohen, and the unruly and rousing Rogues Gallery collection of sea chanteys.
“Hal Willner picks singers and musicians to do very strong material, but kind of forces them to do it in their own way, by virtue of how he encourages them,” Wainwright says. “He’s very funny and very brilliant. His knowledge of music and other things is way over my head and I don’t know half the references he’s talking about, but I nod my head and smile... and hide behind being blonde.”
We’re not buying that for a second. Wainwright’s own songs marry razor wit with raw emotion. Her last album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too was a treasure of huskily sung tunes – ‘You Cheated Me’, ‘Jesus & Mary’, ‘Tower Song’ – that break your heart in the most artful way.
“They take on a life of their own for the use of the listener,” Wainwright says. “So in the moment that you write them you’re trying to use your experience in life to explain a feeling, but very quickly the poetry and the story itself is for the listener and no longer for me as a singer. If I had to feel that all the time I’d want to kill myself!”
Certainly, this listener found the album title way too close to the bone to be funny.
“The song that it comes from (‘Bleeding All Over You’) is not that funny either! Of course there’s a tongue-in-cheek element, and I was exposed to that very early on in listening to my father (Loudon’s) songs, which were, to me, not funny, but everyone else in the audience thought they were because he would would sing them in a funny way or there’d be funny lines, but generally the subject matter was kind of intense. There needs to be some sense of humour in some of these songs’ cos otherwise it’d be so honest it might be a bit... not fair to expose people to that.”
Here’s the million dollar question: how come the love song never gets old?
“It’s like the same mistakes that we make in society, we don’t seem to be learning from history because we don’t want to change and make things perfect. Maybe it’s impossible. I think also those feelings of unrequited love or a difficult love, people can identify with, so I guess it’s one of the roles of music. I think music plays a huge role in religious music and ceremony, trying to create some hope in that gospel sense, but certainly the other side of it is to sing about broken hearts. I guess words and melody are the only thing that can describe the feeling of a broken a heart.”
Alright then, the million-and-one dollar question: is romantic love a form of mental illness?
“I think it’s a form of entertainment! I think that life is pretty devastatingly horrible and scary and banal sometimes. It’s (only) a problem for those who can afford to be lovesick. I don’t imagine there’s much time for lovesickness in a war-torn area or when you’re faced with extreme poverty or other realities. I guess for people that can afford to listen to music, it’s almost like a treat in some ways. But y’know, that’s totally interesting and valid in its own right. Why should we only trudge through life working to the bone and being forced to live in fear, a decrepit life? I think that these are the higher things that life has to offer. Everyone deserves to feel like shit for no good reason!”

Martha Wainwright play the Radisson SAS Hotel on October 24 as part of Sligo Live. The festival also features the likes of The Saw Doctors, Imelda May, Wallis Bird & Josh Ritter. See sligolive.ie for details.