No regrets

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright. Photo / Supplied

It takes a brave woman, some would even suggest foolish, to take on the late great Edith Piaf. But Martha Wainwright insists that her latest project, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris – an album of 15 Piaf covers – is instead the rather selfish fruits of her life-long love affair with the tragic French icon and a fascination with ghosts of the past.

Wainwright – the daughter of American folk-blues musician Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, and younger sister of the most famous of them all, Grammy-nominated Rufus – grew up in French-speaking Montreal. But while her friends were listening to Cyndi Lauper, she was listening to Piaf.

"She was my favourite singer when I was a kid. I just assumed every 8-year-old was obsessed with her," Wainwright laughs. "Then when I got to high school and moved to America, I was shocked that no one listened to her."

The 33-year-old singer, now based in New York, had always planned to make a record of French covers. But she was wary of reinterpreting an artist as popular as Piaf; a concern she steadfastly maintained even when the renowned producer Hal Willner approached her with the idea. "I think he'd been thinking for a long time about someone who could cover Piaf's songs and when he realised I could speak French, he really wanted me to do it."

She was in the middle of making her second album, I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too, and put Willner off. But he persisted and, once Wainwright's record was released, he came calling again. But by that point the world had rekindled its love affair with Piaf, thanks to Olivier Dahan's 2007 movie La Vie en Rose, and Wainwright got cold feet. "When the film came out I thought, 'no, no, it's going to look like I'm trying to attach myself to this Piaf bandwagon of madness'," she says.

Willner refused to give up though – sending Wainwright more than 200 Piaf songs for her to listen to. And slowly she agreed, not to an album, but to playing a series of small gigs in New York area to test the water. The response was far beyond what she had expected; and playing a few shows soon turned into a live record, released in New Zealand last Friday. "I wanted the album to be live because I think it's the best way to convey the songs to a non-French-speaking audience. I found that when I was singing those gigs I really pushed. I pushed to express with my body and my voice the sentiment of the song," she says.

"There was an incredibly intense energy that was caused by the difficulty of the music and my approach to it, which was jumping into it totally." Emotionally giving her all has always been part of the Martha Wainwright method.

Her 2005 debut self-titled album sparked interest from critics for its moments of absolute agitation, none more so than on the track Bloody Mother F***ing A**hole. A lyrical attack aimed at her father, it builds from a seemingly sweet folk song to a tirade of expletives: "I will not pretend, I will not put on a smile, I will not say I'm alright for you, when all I wanted was to be good – you bloody mother f***ing a**hole," she chants, not once but five times. It is for the same slightly unhinged qualities that Wainwright's one and only New Zealand gig to date (a 2006 performance at the Transmission Room in Auckland) remains one of the most electrifying and emotionally charged I've seen in recent years.

Fuelled by a mixture of frustration at an out-of-tune guitar and anger at a group of hecklers, Wainwright was both vulnerable and fiery at the same time, as she stomped her way through songs, stopping some in mid flow, before finishing them with the intensity and power of a lone musical freight train.

The angry lyrics and magical live persona all make sense though when Wainwright speaks of her adoration for Piaf. "She was the first musician I knew who sang with such reckless abandon and complete physical abandon. It was a real eye-opener for me because it was the beginning of my love affair with singers like that. I love really emotive singers."

And with a famous father and an even more famous brother, Wainwright knows all about gender struggles within music, another reason she's so connected with female musical pioneers like Piaf, who have let it all go on stage. "People find it gross sometimes. The other singer that I think of who was that complete in her giving of her soul was Janis Joplin, who also died of a broken heart and a long list of drugs and alcohol.

We are so used to women being pretty and sweet, and there is, of course, something to that, but there's [also] something to a wild vulnerability that is almost out of control."

* Martha Wainwright's Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris is out now.