About Martha Wainwright
Martha Wainwright is a Canadian singer-songwriter and musician. She has released seven critically-acclaimed studio albums.
Wainwright is the daughter of musicians Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and the younger sister of singer–composer Rufus Wainwright.
Martha Wainwright's live performances have received critical praise, with The Telegraph writing that her concerts "leave in no doubt that she is a singular star." Apart from music, she has appeared in several film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge alongside Frances McDormand. Wainwright owns and operates Ursa, a café, concert-hall, bar, and recording space in Montreal.
Martha was born in New York City on May 8, 1976, to folk musicians Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III. She moved to Montreal with her mother and brother when she was one year old, and was raised in Montreal in a musical family. She is Rufus Wainwright's sister and they frequently perform together and collaborate on each other’s albums. Martha is also half-sister to Lucy Wainwright Roche, with whom she collaborated on the album Songs In The Dark, which was nominated for a Juno Award.
Martha Wainwright's first release was an album-length independent cassette of ten tracks, Ground Floor, released in 1997. Wainwright released two EPs in 2005—Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole and I Will Internalize—both of which contained some tracks that also appeared on her self-titled studio album, Martha Wainwright. PopMatters called the Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole EP "a rebellious introductory stance for an artist looking to provoke or silence potential critics." The Sunday Times included the song "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" in their songs of the year and Rolling Stone called it "a blistering prelude to her debut album." "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" was inspired by Wainwright's father, Loudon Wainwright III. She wrote the track as a response to her father's way of writing songs about his family, rather than tending to them. Despite the sentiment, she collaborated a year earlier with Loudon on the song "You Never Phone" on his 2003 album So Damn Happy.
"Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" was used at the end of the second episode in season three of the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black, and at the end of the fourth episode in season one of the HBO original series Big Little Lies.
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