Martha Wainwright has referred to Love Will Be Reborn as her “middle coming-of-age” album, and it’s easy to see why: It’s the 45-year-old songwriter’s first record in five years, and the songs are heavy with acceptance and farewells, most notably to a decade-long marriage. It’s also Wainwright’s only album to make no overt mention of her illustrious parents or brother—songwriters Loudon Wainwright III, the late Kate McGarrigle, and Rufus Wainwright—and the many conversations she’s had with them through her own work. Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.
Despite these departures, Wainwright revisits many familiar themes: her instinctive desire to be a good person (“I want to do right”) and the fatigue in her heart (“I know I’ll never believe in you again”). This time, she’s mostly alone, arriving at these thoughts through monologues to the air, to God, and to the redemptive power of rock’n’roll. There’s less storytelling, a turn from the accusatory tone she favored in the past, which she recently characterized with typical self-deprecation: “‘Oh, you did this [expletive], how could you?’ da da da.” Personal grievances give way to a more existential perspective, while Wainwright’s raw, growling vocals assure us she hasn’t lost her bite; she’s simply found new ways to channel it.
In the past, Wainwright’s fiery excoriations were never simple indictments; they doubled as acts of self-empowerment that defined who she is in relation to the people she isn’t and doesn’t want to be. (Wainwright once called her father a “bloody mother fucking asshole” in a song that cathartically asserted her own presence among the “guys with guitars.”) On Love Will Be Reborn, she swears only once: “Don’t fuck with my kids,” she hisses on “Body and Soul,” amid harrowing descriptions of an abusive relationship. It’s a stirring climax, a turn to the offensive on a record that largely softens her abrasive impulses.
Wainwright’s reflections on motherhood also inform the most desolate scenes on the album—and in her songbook—to date. In “Report Card,” the longest track she’s ever released, Wainwright’s voice is mostly a cappella as she laments the absence of her children in the wake of her divorce, packing their “empty clothes into an empty bin.” In other moments, her voice is paired with echoing hi-hats that hang like drawn-out sighs, moving her forward as if by force.
Yet light spills in through the cracks. The lovely trickles of piano midway through “Report Card” resonate like a note of hope. In “Hole in My Heart,” with ecstatic, spacey synth blasts and a title borrowed from Cyndi Lauper, Wainwright pays tribute to love’s ability to touch even the most hardened hearts. And while catchy hooks have never been her focus, the vibrant melodies shine, buoyed by a wider, more adventurous palette courtesy of new producer Pierre Marchand. The rock opera switch-up in “Rainbow,” with its introduction of electric guitar, lights the stage.
“Why do I have to go on?,” Wainwright asks bluntly on “Rainbow.” “For the kids and the neighbors/For love and for song.” It is a stark realization, a direct response to a similar thought she shared some 15 years ago, in a song called “Far Away”: “I have no reason to be alive/Oh, give me one.” Traversing her work and her life in this self-referential way, Love Will Be Reborn answers old questions and carries her somewhere new. It’s not a place without struggle, but Wainwright dusts herself off with grace. “I sing my little songs of love and pain,” she announces early in the album. It makes everything just a little more bearable.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
