Three years ago, after an ugly split from her bass player/producer husband, Martha Wainwright stepped away from recording and playing to open a cafe and live venue in Montreal.

Not that the singer-songwriter would ever be taken for the average barista or sandwich hand. And with good reason, what with the cheekbones, hooded-eyes attitude and a voice that cracks in all the right places when she performs.

She will tell you that she’s been involved with music for “100 years”. And it’s not entirely wrong, though she is 45 and about to release only her fifth album of music that straddles rock and folk, pop and French classicism.

Martha Wainwright: ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m carrying the baggage of my parents.’

Wainwright’s recording career began in 1997, with her first of many visits to Australia coming in 2005 as part of a tribute to fellow Canadian, Leonard Cohen, and then in the band for her older brother, the perennially flamboyant Rufus.

But as the daughter of two important folk singers on either side of the Canada/US border – her mother Kate McGarrigle and father Loudon Wainwright III – who mined their lives and the lives of anyone around them for material, not only did she have a lineage going back many more decades but she’d also already been the subject of several songs by her parents.

“I am now carrying the baggage of my own musical career, but sometimes I feel like I’m also carrying the baggage of my parents as well,” she says.

Which may go some way to explaining a decision to go into the cafe business.

“I never had a ‘job’ job, I never had other types of responsibilities and something that kept me in one place, and I wanted to see if I could,” Wainwright says. “It was the right moment to do it, too, because there was something about it that was also about protecting what I have for my kids, because I have two kids and I felt I should lay down roots, by building and starting something that maybe they could one day take over if they wanted to, try and create something for them.”

The Montreal space is called Ursa, a name she likes for the way it sounds like some highfalutin’ but mysterious institute as much as its connection to an earth mother.

“When I was having a fairly hard time about five years ago, I was going through a really bad divorce, and really lots of sadness and pain, I wasn’t able to see my kids as much as normal. They were at their dad’s house and it was really hard for me, and I was very scared and I was very lost and afraid,” Wainwright says.

“My friend put a copper bracelet around my wrist – copper’s supposed to help or something – and on it, it said ‘mama bear’. It’s a very important animal in many religions and mythologically, [about] wanting to protect, and that’s what it felt like to me, trying to create something of protection and community.”

What she couldn’t protect herself from was the aftermath of the divorce and custody, which peppers the latest album. In particular there is Report Card, which is both beautiful and raw as she sings to and about her children, making promises and wishes in equal measure as she says, “I want you to feel like I did”.

“That song and maybe two of the others I wrote over some time because it was hard not to cry a lot,” Wainwright says. “I’d be alone and I’d start singing, I would play for a while and then I would have to put down a guitar and leave it for a few days. But I needed to be finished, I needed to say it.”

There was never any question that she would sing the song, no matter how much it exposed of her to us or to her children.

“To me it was important to talk about that loneliness, to talk about the solitude, what it felt like to be so torn away from your kids,” she says. “And I want them to know.”

Of course, as the next generation of Wainwrights and McGarrigles, the children had better get used to this public examination of parents’ broader lives. Not that their mother is worried.

“I like hearing songs that made reference to me. My father did it more than my mother, or did it more specifically, and it felt good in Loudon’s song when he sang Five Years Old, the happy birthday Martha song,” she says.

“Of course, it’s about not being present and it’s an apology, but I’m glad that he wrote a song about me instead of not, which would have been worse. Can you imagine?”

Which is of course something children of cafe owners never have to do.

Love Will Be Reborn is out on August 20

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