Martha Wainwright on Being Édith Piaf

It's a cold, soggy June afternoon in Williamsburg. After getting drenched in curtains of rain, I run into Marlow & Sons and eventually sit down with a cup of coffee and a brownie the size of a cinder block. A few minutes later, Martha Wainwright joins me with a coffee and a slab of strawberry almond pound cake. We both take turns lamenting the awful weather, but find it makes for the perfect ambiance when getting down to business, discussing Édith Piaf and her staging of the legendary singer's more obscure songs at Dixon Place, along with the accompanying live record, due out this fall.

What inspired you to dive into Édith Piaf’s back catalog? When did you realize you wanted to stage this tribute?
It’s not that I never really wanted to—that’s not right. My producer Hal Willner is this innovative guy and had approached me a few years ago. And he said, “You know you should do a record of Édith Piaf songs.” And I said, “Oh it’s kind of been done.” She’s quite poplar, obviously. The film had just come out or was about to come out. Since then there’s been a musical. I was like, I don’t know that it’s quite right. He thought of me because I speak French because of the way I sing. I was the only person in his mind who he thought I could approach this material. Not trying to emulate her completely—but bring something new to it as well. So he sent me 300 songs. And I started listening. I realized there were so many songs I hadn’t heard. I thought I knew Piaf quite well. She was a huge influence on me as a singer—since I was a young girl, growing up in Montréal. I listened to her since the age of 8, 9, 10 years old. The first time I went to Père Lachaise, I only went to her grave.

I was definitely totally influenced by her, but felt she was too large a figure to do a show of. Then, in listening to the material and sort of seeing these lesser known and rare songs and listening to these incredible arrangements, I put together a band of musicians who are a little sort of off-center, a little quirky. Like a downtown New York sound. And I said, “Let’s do some shows and see what comes out.” We picked 12-13 songs. As I did our shows—I did two shows over about a year period—I realized that it was really working and A. it was working and B. there was something brilliant about the fact that it glued together in a concise way, being Piaf stuff.

How did you determine what was quirky or left-field?
I like to sing standards and old songs. But I’ve always been afraid of sounding too much like Adult Contemporary. Doing it straight, like Rod Stewart or something. I felt that Piaf’s arrangements were already crazy, because they have such a European twist. It’s really different from American standards from that time. Stuff with crazy flute sounds and horns doing really off-kilter things. So I went to my friend Doug Wieselman—of Yuka Honda and the downtown scene. He can play straight up music, but also can play experimental music. I trusted him to lead us to something that was beautiful or melodic and representative of the song. And if there was a “noise” element, we let that happen. And not be totally afraid of that. It was a more downtown feel. I think it suits well where we’ve done the shows.

Do you feel pressured because in choosing Piaf’s rarer work, you may be overlooking the more iconic music that people want to hear?
I don’t want to say that no one has sung Piaf’s songs already. But I don’t want to act as Édith Piaf. I don’t want to go up there with the looking sad, pretending to be drunk, with the dark wig on. It’s about the material and the brilliance of the material. She is the glue of it all. What’s so interesting about Édith Piaf is that she asked people to write songs for her. Some of whom didn’t write songs, some of whom were poets, or writers, or friends of hers. So the material is very, very poetic. Of course there are one or two people will recognize. There are some really great songs and they’re great for a damn reason. I’m not going to do songs like “La vie en rose.” They’re too iconic to Édith. For me, they’re almost untouchable. Not say someone else couldn’t do a great job. A song like I’m going to be doing, like “La Foule”—people will recognize, so it’s not a complete, “What’s this?” at every turn.

And why a live record?
In doing the shows, I felt the cohesiveness of the Piaf thing really worked. In doing the shows, I realized the record should be live. I think there was an energy that happened. And a tension and an energy in the music that really worked. Me trying, fumbling through these words, reading the words, trying to get through the material. It’s so fast and it’s in French, which isn’t my first language. It’s quite stressful. That sort of created an urgency. A few months ago, when I said to Hal, “Let’s make this record and let’s make it live,” this to me, this is the best way to do this material. I will make a French record down the road.

So, have you always had a desire to record French music, but found yourself at odds, because you’ve been recording what’s classified as “alternative music”? How do you reconcile that?
When Hal came to me to ask me to do the Piaf songs, my first instinct was “No.” And second was, “I should do a record of French songs.” French songs ranging from the last 100 years, French songs from 10 years ago, and French songs from 150 years ago. I like to sing covers. And I like to sing covers from different eras. From before the 1930s, from before the 1920s, coming up into the 1980s and 1990s. That might be in some ways a more interesting record. ‘Cause, yes, Martha Wainwright is a songwriter of distinct types of songs. As a singer, it’s fun to get out from behind the guitar.

Will you incorporate any visual cues inspired by Piaf on stage?
There are two strikes against me in doing this. A live record which separates people—because people don’t necessarily love live records all the time. There’s a distance that’s created because the sound quality can be sort of further away. And then, it’s in French. Already, two things for an American or British audience that’s a separator. I thought it was really important to have visual elements to accompany this. We’re going to be filming. I’ll call it a DVD, but I like to call it a film, because in my mind it’s a film. I hired a guy called Jamie Catto who is in the band Faithless, who in their heyday, had a lot of projections. And he started making films about ten years ago. He made a film that was nominated for an Academy Award called One Giant Leap, where he traveled around the world recording musicians.

He was really into this idea. He approached me. I didn’t want a straight-up DVD where I’m in the theatre and there’s one thing and the next song and it fades into the next song. They can be really boring. We wanted to incorporate the visual element built-in. So I’ll be singing in front of projections. Each projection’s been chosen for each song, but we’re bringing it to New York rather than having the projections be in Paris. For instance, Piaf was a street singer. So one obvious thing—we have a projection on two walls in which I’m in the corner—is to put me in a street scene. Everything will be black and white and grainy and evocative of a different time. Other projections are in reference to some of the lyrics in the song. Or just something simple that’s very slow moving. And perhaps we’ll do shots where your focus is on my hands or on another musician. We want to edit it as a visual accompaniment to the music.

Have you found any similarities between Piaf’s work and your own work?
I hope. I hope there are similarities. One of the things I find in learning this material. And singing covers. And singing other people’s material is that I learn a lot. I’m not someone who reads a lot of biographies or autobiographies. I’m not a very good fan of people. I don’t know a lot about different musicians’ lives. I have a blank canvas of where I’ve come from musically. So delving into someone like Piaf, hopefully I’m absorbing as much as I can. And it’ll later come out in my own music and I can draw parallels in my own work. Because it’s so beautiful.

What specifics?
There are certain things about her that have always influenced me when I listened to her. The emotive sensibility of her voice. She’s an incredibly emotional singer and I’ve always been an incredibly emotional singer and pained singer. I like to sing about unrequited love, which she has many songs written about. It’s the loneliness and the darkness. It’s something you have to parallel between her and me in that way. A dramatic sensibility. Sort of a willingness to go to the edge and let people see you at your most vulnerable. Which sometimes, in pop music, people have a lot of façade. There’s a lot of make up and a lot of smiles. I think with Piaf, and with myself too, there’s a lot of falling apart that hopefully people can appreciate as being a part of life. It’s not that I think you want people to feel sorry for you or you want to be a victim. It’s a willingness to go to express those lonelier and sadder things.

What things apart from Piaf—cultural or historical—do you think has inspired you on this project?
The most obvious connection is of course is the language. Because everything about French culture has to do with language. It’s what they’re obsessed with. It’s really the thing that defines them. They’re very proud about it. So the fact that I grew up speaking French at school, went to school in French, but I’m not French-Canadian. Instead of being completely in the French-Canadian cultural scenes, with an understanding of the language, I’m sort of able to have an international sense with the language.

I think that in French, their heyday, culturally, was with Édith Piaf at least in music. So hopefully I’m attaching myself onto that incredible era of French culture. Once again, doing it without wearing a beret and trying to. I don’t want to obviate it. I don’t want to set up Dixon Place like a fucking cabaret with coffee tables and a smoky vibe and have some absinthe. We’re going to do it like a performance show. It’s not about trying to create a cabaret feeling. It’s about trying to sing these songs ‘cause they’re really fucking hard to sing.

So, if you could be any Édith Piaf song, which one would you be?
I’m thinking about the ones we’re doing, obviously. There’s a beautiful one, I find the melody is transfixing, the movement of it is transfixing. There’s one where you become the song. “La Foule”—it’s about a woman who gets caught up in the crowd, like a Mardi Gras scene. All of a sudden, she finds herself in the arms of a man and they’re dancing. And it’s incredibly romantic. This is the man of her dreams. She’s being completely transported by the crowd. All of a sudden, the crowd pushes the guy away and she loses him forever and she never finds him again. It’s about this moment that’s perfection. I identify with the longing—that it’s at your fingertips and then the loss of it. The air of the song and the movement of it—it’s in and out of time into a waltz. It slows down and speeds up. The arrangement and the production really brings you into the crowd feeling.

So why do you think there’s such a general heightened interest in her suddenly?
Other people were tired of talking about Nina Simone. So they needed someone else to talk about. I love Nina Simone. We love our tragic women who basically die because of loneliness and whatever else. It was Piaf’s time. I think it’s important for people in this country to understand. No one, barring Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson, was ever as loved as Piaf. Piaf was the pride of her country. When she died, traffic stopped in Paris. That’s never happened before. And internationally so. The young generation is discovering and because it’s a different language, they feel like it’s more of a discovery than it perhaps is. She’s perhaps the most famous French singer. I couldn’t think of anybody else who would be as famous, even a man—maybe [Serge] Gainsbourg, but that’s later. And not as famous.

So, I think people are realizing that she was a big deal that she was a part of the Resistance—and she represented the psyche of the nation. In a big way. And her story is so amazing. All the lovers and all the weird relationships—all the psychotic stuff—I wouldn’t want to deal with all that stuff. That’s why for me, it’s about tipping my hat to the material, to her. In a small way.