Martha Wainwright on Bob Dylan: “He is the artist that all artists are led to”
There seems to be no end to Bob Dylan’s impact and influence. Even Martha Wainwright, a daughter of the iconic and endlessly talented Wainwright family, credits Dylan as the musician to end all musicians.
As the daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and the younger sister of Rufus Wainwright, the singer comes from a folk-rock dynasty. With each member more talented than the last, you would’ve thought Wainwright’s biggest inspiration would come from inside the family home, but no.
When asked by the Irish Examiner to name the musicians, albums, and artistry that shaped her, Dylan stands in as a kind of spiritual father figure. “He is the artist that all artists are led to,” she said, regarding the musician as a kind of final boss of the music world.
“If I was playing records throughout the evening with my friends and we were going in different places, in the end, if we wanted to top it off, or bring it down, it seemed all roads led to Bob Dylan.”
One of Wainwright’s earliest introductions to the music world was, in fact, led by Dylan. After seeing him perform at the Newport Folk Festival, Loudon Wainwright III made it his mission to follow in Dylan’s footsteps. Martha’s first experience on stage would come when her father brought her and her brother up at that same festival, paying homage to the idol he would pass down to his children.
Loudon Wainwright himself was once dubbed the “new Dylan”, satirising the comment on his 1992 track, ‘Talking New Bob Dylan’.
It was an influence that endured for Martha Wainwright, informing her own work as a musician. “As a songwriter, I can’t deny that I was pretty obsessed and listened to a lot of Bob Dylan,” she said.
Even as her tastes and sound changed as she grew up and moved away from the more traditional folk sound of her father’s music, Dylan seemed to grow with her. “It was always the thing that I went back to, an album like Blood on the Tracks,” she added.
She took the praise even further as she told The Quietus, “I think for me Dylan even more than Leonard and even more than my parents is the ideal songwriter.” With her father being equally as big of a fan, we doubt he’d contest the comment at all.
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