Martha Wainwright mines Edith Piaf’s pain-drenched oeuvre, with electrifying results.
It was a small crowd in an even smaller room, the low-lit rotunda of Manhattan’s art-deco Spiegeltent. There was a piano, an upright bass, and not much else. And then there was Martha Wainwright, apologizing in advance for many things: for her nearly-gone voice (which she dissed as “this lovely treat”), for the band’s lack of rehearsal, and for playing Edith Piaf songs most of us probably wouldn’t recognize. And when she stopped apologizing, and her first raspy notes soared in the pin-drop quiet, it was clear that this experiment, as she called it, was no mere tribute.
That night was eventually turned into the Hal Willner-produced “Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris: Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record,” recorded live at NYC’s Dixon Place in June 2009. Some call this cabaret-ish foray a departure for the half-Canadian singer-songwriter, but listen to her folk-rock output and it’s all there: open-wound pain, lives wrecked by love, delivered in a whisper or a howl that threatens to crack, and sometimes does. (The song "Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole," off the EP of the same name, sums it up nicely). Quite simply, in 2010, no-one does pure, raw, frayed-edge emotion like Martha Wainwright; 70 years ago, that was Piaf’s bailiwick. The tiny, tragic French singer is best known today for accordion-drenched froth (“La Vie en Rose”), rafter-thudding bombast (“Je Ne Regrette Rien”), or the part Marion Cotillard buzzed off her eyebrows to play. But Piaf’s less popular oeuvre is considerably darker and more jagged than these extremes suggest, and it’s this liminal space where she and Wainwright meet.
You’ll find no meet-cute romance in the 15 tracks of “Sans Fusils,” but love – awful, illusion-shaking, life-destroying love – is all around. In “Les Blouses Blanches,” a woman locked away in a mental facility re-imagines the doctors’ white coats as the white dress she once wore on a lovers’ picnic. “Marie Trottoir” has such a chipper melody that the story, about a hooker whose heels are a little too high, hair a little too blonde, becomes sweetly innocent. These were Piaf’s people: Prostitutes (she was raised by a madam), vagrants, guinguette musicians and two-bit dancing girls, waitresses who mop up late nights in the café with a last cigarette, wondering when their lives will start. Dreamers, all of them.
“Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris: Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record”
Import available via 101 Distribution on Amazon: (U.S. release: Spring)
