Martha Wainwright(CANADA)

Martha Wainwright is beginning again. The beguiling performer and songwriter returns with her sixth studio album Love Will Be Reborn. Not since 2012’s Come Home to Mama has a Martha Wainwright record been so full of original written material. 

This May, Wainwright returns to Australian stages with her band – pianist Edwin de Goeij, bass player Morgan Moore, drummer Tommy Crane and saxophonist Nicolas Deslis – to present those new songs, the expanded Love Will Be Reborn and the songs from her storied back catalogue that still mean so much to her and to her fans.

Martha Wainwright's role as an artist has always been to embrace her wildness and sketch out her raw depth. This edge is what makes Wainwright uncompromisingly herself and continues to draw in an audience two decades on. To begin again does not mean starting over. This process of rebirth honours the past to move forward. Love Will Be Reborn captures Wainwright’s heart in transition. In an effort to rise out of some painful depths, as she says much like a phoenix from the ashes of an existential twilight, Wainwright bore witness to what her heart endured to find a new joy once more.

“Behind her self-effacing humour and ramshackle demeanour, Wainwright knows how to quietly command a stage… Similarly impressive was her virtuosic use of vocals as musical shading, adding texture and timbre, effortlessly switching gear between a hushed whisper and melismatic yodel.” - Stephen Dalton, The Standard.