The Hook & Ladder is please to present acclaimed artist Martha Wainwrightin concert. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of her seminal eponymous debut studio album, Martha Wainwright announces the 20th Anniversary Tour.
2005’s ‘
Martha Wainwright’ showed an artist of considerable depth and vision and secured herself a place as one of the finest songwriters of her generation.
With an undeniable voice and an arsenal of powerful songs, Martha Wainwright is a beguiling performer and a refreshingly different force in music.
Born in Montreal to parents Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, both successful singers and songwriters, Martha Wainwright was immersed in music from birth. Singing or performing on-stage and in the studio at an early age, she became disenchanted at the thought of a musical career during high school. Shunning music, she decided to study drama at Montreal’s Concordia University instead.
Soon after starting her studies, however, she began composing her own material and performing in clubs and coffeehouses around Montreal. She also began touring with her older brother, Rufus Wainwright, as a backing vocalist and musician. Moving from Montreal to New York, Martha was cast in a stage musical called Largo. She also released a self-titled EP, as well as a four-song EP. In February 2005, Wainwright issued another EP called Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole (said to be inspired by her sometimes rocky relationship with her dad), followed by the self-titled Martha Wainwright, her full-length debut album.
Martha Wainwright’s role as an artist has always been to embrace her wildness and sketch out her raw depth. This edge is what makes Wainwright uncompromisingly herself and continues to draw in an audience two decades on.
Over a career that spans three decades, Brad Barr has cultivated a uniquely visceral, disarmingly intimate approach to the guitar. If you’re already a fan of the Montreal-based Barr Brothers, or the legendary improv-rock trio The Slip, then you already know — it’s futile to try and categorize his ongoing experiments in sound and songwriting.
His musical journeys, almost always in lockstep with sibling drummer Andrew Barr, have taken them on chimerical paths: from all-night sets at jam festivals to the main stages of Newport Folk and Montreal Jazz; from tightly focused avant-rock collaborations to atmospheric reverb-laced folk ballads. Starting in the mid-90s, their trio The Slip built a global cult following for their wide-ranging compositions and deeply improvisational sets.
When the two brothers moved to Montreal in 2005, they started a new chapter with experimental harpist Sarah Pagé and formed the Barr Brothers. The ensuing three albums have each been nominated for a Juno award, and they have shared the bill with such artists as My Morning Jacket, Calexico, Bela Fleck, The War on Drugs, Tinariwen, Built to Spill, The Prodigy, Emmylou Harris, and others.
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