Martha Wainwright: ‘Forget rock excess, life on the road was a juggling act for me’

The Canadian-American singer-songwriter on why she needed to tell a different story in her candid autobiography

The rock autobiography is typically a male genre, telling tales of excess so competitive that readers could be forgiven for wishing Keith Richards, Neil Young, Roger Daltrey, et al, would break the monotony by taking up wood whittling.

But now comes Martha Wainwright, whose autobiography, published this week, is a female-gaze account of what it takes to juggle relationships, familial and domestic circumstances with life under the stage lights.

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Martha Wainwright: ‘Divorce has given me wisdom’

The musician, 45, talks about putting down roots, losing her mother, playing music and and how middle age has been a transformative time

My first memory is my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] singing to me. It was the song Go Tell Aunt Rhody, which is about a goose dying and the gander being depressed. Very morbid. I was very little. I remember her hand softly caressing my arm while she sang it to me. It’s a lovely memory. It’s a sad song, even a scary one. But it was comforting.

I’m still grieving for my mother. I’m very much in it. She’s been gone over 10 years now, but I wear a lot of her clothes, I live in the house she lived in and I sing her songs. Her dying at 63 has defined me in lots of ways. I was only 33 when I lost her. But this year I’ve been thinking about it differently. Dying young means that you’re saved years of old age. There’s a lot of suffering in old age. That’s been helping me to think like that.

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