Wainwright opened Ursa in the spring of 2019, both to root at home with her two young boys, Arcangelo and Francis, and combine her love for cooking and music. It was inspired by venues she visited in Europe that operate as an inclusive community space, a place where art coexists and isn’t compartmentalized. The concept was something that long simmered in the back of Wainwright’s mind, as the pairing of food and music has always been such an integral part of her upbringing. She is, of course, sister of fellow musician Rufus Wainwright, and daughter to folk icons Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle—half of the sister duo, Kate & Anna McGarrigle. 

“When my aunt would come and practice at home with my mom, it was generally done in the kitchen and there was always something bubbling on the stove, you know, dinner for that evening,” Wainwright recalls. Kate often made moussaka and the Greek dish is one that now Wainwright herself loves to cook. She likes to prepare its different stages (eggplant, wine-drenched lamb sauce, noodles, béchamel) while listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast live from New York and sipping a glass of red. Like the meal, it’s a layered, delicious process.

Ursa is also where Wainwright started work on her new album, Love Will Be Reborn. Its coziness was the perfect setting for unravelling the layers of the past few years—a painful divorce from producer Brad Albetta; the surprising discovery of new love; an intricate journey towards finding joy again—and channeling it into her songwriting. Wainwright closed the venue to the public for about a week and invited three Toronto musicians she toured with for her last record, 2016’s folk-rock opus, Goodnight City, to hunker down with her. They’d barbecue outside, crack a beer in the afternoon, and take over the entire space. “I think what it allowed with the music was to have this kind of living room setting,” she says. “We could get to a really honest way of performing the songs and a real togetherness that you really hear on the album.” 

As a result, Love Will Be Reborn is an achingly vulnerable meditation on middle age, with evocative instrumentation in Wainwright’s entirely distinctive realm of folk, jazz, rock, and punk that draw out the poignancy of her words and raw emotion in her voice. “How long does this go on?” she implores on “Sometimes,” surveying a scale of feelings felt during her breakup. There’s “Middle of the Lake,” naming rock and roll as her salvation. Another standout is “Rainbow,” a rousing track that, Wainwright says, is particularly important to her. It’s about survival. She talks about “basically wanting to die, but then needing to go on for the kids and for the neighbours and for music—just let me find that strength, drum up that strength, wherever that’s going to come from, to keep going.” 

Wainwright is always brutally honest in her music, but her usual way of not mincing words conflicted somewhat with wanting to protect her children from the grim details of divorce. It pushed her as a songwriter. “I think my approach has been to find ways to say what I feel, but in a way that maybe they’ll understand when they’re older, when it’s okay for them to hear these things—because it’s important to be honest, but also look at them through a broader lens,” she says. “What have I learned? What are the things that I know are true that I can say that’s positive, that’s good, or that can resonate in different ways?”

On “Report Card,” the agony Wainwright felt amid custody arrangements comes through as she sings, “I hope you don’t miss me as much as I miss you, because my heart is always broken and I don’t want you to feel the way I do.” The heart-wrenching song, stripped back with dark guitar pangs and whispering cymbals, was recorded live off the floor at Ursa. “It’s just me baring my soul a little bit to the kids—but, really, I’m talking to the audience, the adults, who know more of what I’m talking about. [The boys] kind of laugh at the report card thing and then they’re distracted. They’re interested in Minecraft, you know what I mean? It’s like, why do they have to be subjected to Martha Wainwright? That’s a lot!” Wainwright laughs. 

Wainwright’s own parents divorced when she was little. “I think that my reaction to [my divorce] was so strong that I wonder if that was not the child in me reliving it in a way, you know? The fear and the anxiety that I felt,” she considers. “So rather than it kind of helping me, does it make it worse that I had been through this as a kid? Why was this happening again?”