At last, the spotlight shines

It wouldn’t be out of line to ask singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright how it feels to be stepping out of the shadow of her famous relative at long last. Before she could answer, though, she wouldn’t be out of line posing a question of her own: Which one?

Jakob Dylan may have Papa Bob to reckon with, Julian and Sean Lennon have to live with the fact that their father was a Beatle and Wynonna Judd has long struggled to establish an identity separate from the one she established in the Judds with her mother, Naomi.

Wainwright, however, has an entire family tree to measure herself against.

Her father is singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III; her mother, folk-pop singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, half of Canada’s widely respected McGarrigle Sisters, along with Martha’s Aunt Anna.

With an older brother named Rufus, Martha, 28, isn’t even the first product of Kate and Loudon’s long-ago fizzled marriage to hit the concert trail.

Rufus, whom she’s supported playing and singing in his band and on his critically acclaimed albums, is all Brecht-Weill drama and heart-on-sleeve romanticism, while Martha seems to have picked up more of the no-holds-barred honesty of her father’s most pointed songs and goosed it with a liberal dose of in-your-face punk attitude.

All that comes through compellingly in “BMFA,” the EP (its title is not suitable to print in this newspaper) that she’s been selling at her concerts for the last year and that Rounder Records released this month, as well as in “Martha Wainwright,” her debut solo album, due April 12.

As in the music of Rufus, Loudon, Kate and Anna, the love-hate dynamic of family is a recurring theme.

Like her sibling rivalry with Rufus. “Not that it’s a bitter rivalry. It’s just the nature of egocentric human beings to have certain roles,” Martha says. “People have roles in families, and there are all sorts of jealousies, and when that happens, even adults can revert to being like they were when they were 8 years old.”

For his part, in January’s edition of Mojo magazine Rufus listed “BMFA” when asked about the best music he’d heard in 2004. So did Norah Jones, who described her as “one of my favorite singers.... She’s also a great songwriter.”

Some of the competition and jealousy Martha has experienced recently with Rufus have grown out of her place in his burgeoning career. He’s put out four albums in the last seven years.

“He asked me straight out to put my career on the back burner and come on the road with him,” she says. “Then, every time I got a little further ahead with my record, he’d be releasing another one and needed me to sing backup. It would have kept on going like that if I hadn’t stopped to say, ‘No, I’m making a record.’ ”

Wainwright has been generating enthusiastic reviews for years for her often brutal frankness and shows in which she can unleash a hurricane-force vocal power that contrasts effectively with the cabaret-style intimacy and emotional vulnerability she taps elsewhere.

“In the case of Rufus and Martha,” Loudon says in a separate interview, “you can trace influences Kate and I might have had, but they are themselves. There’s that groovy Latin phrase -- sui generis. Sometimes I don’t know where ... Martha learned to sing that great. That’s her own phrasing.”

The family’s musical universe is hardly insular. Martha also cites her love for the poetical lyrics of Leonard Cohen, the rock chutzpah of Chrissie Hynde and, in the EP’s title song, which also appears on the album, she gives a quick nod, musically and lyrically, that telegraphs her appreciation for Bob Dylan.

In fact, she’s currently in Australia with Rufus and the McGarrigles, all of whom were part of a touring Cohen tribute concert. They’ve also been working in some family performances as well. Martha said she’ll do some solo shows in L.A. later this month -- dates and venue haven’t been finalized -- then hit Europe before going back to New York and resuming hometown shows with her band, which is the way she prefers to perform.

The reason? As with so many aspects of her life, it comes back to family.

“I’m happy to do the solo stuff for now, but I’m pushing my record company to spend a little more money. I don’t want them to depend on me being a solo artist. It’s a lonely life and I’ve seen my dad do it, and he’s been doing it for 35 years. Sitting in restaurants by yourself, alone on the road....

“Luckily this process has taken so long for me. I’m not a prolific writer, but this record has been in the can for at least a year. New songs have been popping up, so I’m not worried [about the next album].

“I’m not going to put that kind of pressure on myself. I already have to live with the problem that both my parents are phenomenal songwriters. Kate and Anna and Loudon have written a lot of good ones. That’s something I have to reconcile.”