“Saving my life”: Martha Wainwright discusses the best song of her career
Born to Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and the younger sister of Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright has always had music running through her bones. With inspiration flowing both inside and outside of the family, Wainwright foremost fell in love with the sounds and words of Bob Dylan, uttering the famous remark, “All roads lead to Bob”.
This doesn’t seem as plucked out of nowhere when considering the immense ways Dylan impacted her father, who exposed her to one of her earliest musical inspirations at the Newport Folk Festival, deciding that he one day wanted to achieve the same calibre of success. But Wainwright’s entire life has been surrounded by music from all over, not just singer-songwriter pioneers but deep cuts from worlds most have failed to discover.
As a result, she knows exactly what to do to keep albums fresh, even in today’s landscape, where exercising a healthy and intriguing balance between past, present, and future is the key to longtime success. Most of these musings come straight from the heart—a quality her family has long held close—with honesty permeating the walls of many of her records as easily as breathing.
From her earliest work, Ground Floor, Wainwright has been a transparent force, filtering her experiences in her expression like a gateway into her soul, celebrating the nonlinear aspects of growing, learning, and developing with unfiltered vulnerability. Perhaps more intriguing is that there seems to be no secret to Wainwright’s artistry; more than often, ideas come to her naturally, speaking more to her prowess than even she is likely to realise.
Discussing her approach with The Line of Best Fit, she said her musical ideas can strike at any moment; she just has to be fast and efficient enough to be able to capture them and write them down. In her words, these are “largely just ones that came to me when I had to write them down,” she said, adding, “These are songs that have been really powerful for me recently.”
While this categorises her appeal, it also makes choosing favourites difficult. While some might find it easy to list off her hits, including ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’, ‘Factory’, and countless others, for Wainwright, her best song is none of these classics and is actually ‘Middle of The Lake’. In her mind, it’s one that particularly sticks because of its enigmatic aura, making it stand out within her broader discography.
“There’s something about this song from my new record that I find quite mysterious. It doesn’t sound like a lot of my other music, and I’ve been kind of mystified by it since I wrote it. Maybe it’s because I fully recognise myself in this song, and that’s not always the case,” she said, recalling writing it one summer by a lake after trying to sail a canoe to no avail. Stuck in a frustrating push-pull situation with the wind, she realised that everybody had felt trapped within the pandemic, and the song came to her as a result of her own personal turmoil.
However, she also reflected on the song as a symbol of the power of music itself. Writing it made her find solace in her own creative expression as she discovered a newfound appreciation for her unique position. For this reason, ‘Middle of The Lake’ also epitomises music’s salvation more than any of her other songs. As she put it: “When I was writing this song it just came out of me that being able to play music is really a lifesaver. Like, maybe it’s the thing that stops me from killing myself. Maybe Rock and Roll is actually saving my life.”
