They folk you up, your mum and dad

Martha Wainwright says she learned from falling apart.

Martha Wainwright could probably turn a death-metal lyric into a lullaby. When she unleashes the vitriolic chorus of Bloody [Expletive] Asshole - her best known song from last year's debut album - it's disconcerting enough. The story behind it is just as surprising.

The 29-year-old reckons she was having a "teenage" moment when she wrote it. She'd just had a row with her father, famous Canadian folk singer Loudon Wainwright III.

"It's about him not taking me seriously musically," she explains, backstage before a gig in Washington DC. "He was like, 'Martha, are you going to make a record? Why are you wasting so much time? What are you doing?' I think I wrote that song because I was afraid he might be right."

Wainwright snr can rest easy as his daughter settles in for the last leg of a "crazy" year.

On Friday she winds down her tour to promote her acclaimed self-titled album in Auckland. For a release that had little marketing, it's testament to her gut-wrenching songs and fierce, freewheeling vocal style that her star is finally on the rise. She even scored a cameo role in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator as a torch singer.

Wainwright insists that growing up with a successful dad didn't make things any easier to bust out on her own. Then there's her famous mum, Kate McGarrigle, her famous aunt, Anna McGarrigle, and her famous brother, Rufus Wainwright.

So forgive the youngest in the brood for taking her time.

"I had a really hard time getting a record deal," she says. "No one would give me one and the people who did want to work with me were very interested in making a record that I wasn't sure I wanted to make, whether it was a really folk record or something more pop. I went along with those things but at the very end I would sabotage it. In retrospect I think I was holding up for the right thing.

"There's a lot of pressure to do something good because everyone in my family has made a great first record - and great every record. I knew it had to sound different to my family - and different to other people. Because I'm not going to be able to get famous because of great pop songs."

Her self-deprecating style is more brutal than what's on the airwaves anyway. Even over the elegant, dreamy songs, she'll drop in barbed observations about sex, loneliness and "boiling water to kill myself". At times she doesn't even bother to stick to the melody, preferring to let her voice crack all over the words. "I don't even know what the melody is," she laughs.

Aside from admiring Bob Dylan's conversational lyrics and Leonard Cohen's poetic style, she was also influenced by her parents and invited her mother to play banjo on the album. "They were both craftsmen or songsmiths or whatever they're called," she says, as if to suggest she doesn't consider herself one.

Wainwright grew up with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, and recalls him bringing home bags of elephant dung from the opera production of Aida when it came to Montreal.

"It was certainly unconventional and I probably went through a few years of being embarrassed by the outlandishness. We lived in a really nice neighbourhood but our house was falling down and there were all these crazy-looking people who were coming into our house."

She spent years honing her skills on the road with her family, including support gigs for her brother. Now she says she feels comfortable on stage but she still has the occasional "terrible" moment of self-doubt. In the song Far Away she sings of having no husband, no child and "no reason to live". And in the album's most eyebrow-raising moment: "I wish I was born a man so I could learn how to stand up for myself."

"You get pegged when you're a girl with a guitar," she says. "The guys always seem to be having so much fun. They're getting laid a lot more, they're really comfortable in their role as songwriters. I'm pretty comfortable and I enjoy it. But that vulnerability thing that you sometimes hear in the song really exists.

"If I'm not careful and not feeling good about myself I can feel like I really shouldn't be there. And that's a terrible, terrible feeling. But I also learned from falling apart. Because then you have to realise that you get to a real raw and truthful thing.

"This summer I was totally freaking out and thought I was totally shit. I was on stage and my brother had played there the night before and it was like, fantastic, and I was just feeling crap and it got worse. And then I go on stage and I was just bawling, like, what is wrong with me?"

She is grateful for the attention but says, unconvincingly, that she'll never be a great songwriter. "What I'm trying to be is a good songwriter. I'm not always sitting around with my head in a pad, coming up with brilliant things. I just sort of race around and live like normal people, cook and clean and do the laundry. Hopefully that experience of keeping my eyes open is going to give me something to write about - eventually."


LOWDOWN


WHO: Martha Wainwright, Canadian singer-songwriter, daughter of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle and younger sister of Rufus Wainwright


RELEASES: Bloody [Expletive] Asshole EP (2005), Martha Wainwright LP (2005)


PERFORMANCE: The Transmission Room, Friday