A Quote by Martha Wainwright
I wanted to be heard myself, which is hard in a household of people who were very showy. It forced me to find myself and define a personality and a way of being different, and that's a thing that's going to help me to survive in a world of many people playing the guitar.
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So many people always try to help me carry my luggage and help me do things I can do myself. If I can do it myself, I'm going to do it myself. I'm not going to let other people do it for me, and I think that's a big part of where I came from. I'm not a real prissy girl.
Playing devil's advocate with myself is very, very hard. It's a 24-hour thing. Because I know there's a possibility that people are going to come after me, they're not going to understand me, so I have to be ready.
As I say, there's something that scares the hell out of me but it really makes me work hard in losing myself. I'm not really interested in me as an actor or being a personality player, or a Hollywood star. What's given to me is to become different people and to find the truth of that. That is really what I do.
I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.
Pushing myself against my own will really, because some of this stuff is hard. I don't consider myself to be a great guitar player, so pushing myself as a guitar player or pushing myself as a singer, as a performer, and just riding that fine line between being so hard on yourself that it's counter-productive and being so hard on yourself that nothing is ever good enough is what drives me.
We're in a very competitive industry, and sometimes the bigger Hollywood things are not so risk takey. I find myself mostly existing in this weirdo indie world, which I feel really comfortable being in. The thing that motivates me the most is to try to do something way different than the last thing that I did.
The clashes of people and the clashes of cultures have assisted me in learning the openness you have to be a part of in New York. You're always meeting people who are different than you. You always have to find a way to exist in it and also find a way to be yourself. In Stockholm, I thought I was artsy, then I came to New York and was like, "there's a bunch of artsy people everywhere!" It really forced me to start looking myself and ask. "what does it mean to be me?"
So when it comes to being a role model to women, I think it's because of the way that I feel about myself, and the way that I treat myself. I am a woman, I treat myself with respect and I love myself, and I think that if I'm holding myself to a certain esteem and keeping it real with myself, then that's going to translate to people like me.
My career has suddenly started to be the one that I'd always wanted, not in terms of level of success, but in terms of - and this is what I've been banging on about - playing different parts in different media. I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.
When I was in high school, I tried too hard to be cool and to impress people, but playing all these different characters has helped me find myself again.
I was a very determined kid. I couldn't imagine any other life for myself. This happens to kids who are different in any way. How am I going to make a life? Who am I going to be when I grow up? Will there be a place for me in the world? Acting gave me a sense of purpose, but it also gave me a sense that I would survive, that I would find my place.
You've heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that's because there's been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.
I grew up being very different and being ready to fight people. I wanted to stand up for myself, and I wanted to not let anyone think they know me based on appearances, so I was always just fighting back with people.
I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was, in a way, very basic. So all I wanted to have was drums and another guitar pretty much playing what I wrote on guitar, and I was just going to sing.
I think I started to approach time in a different way after the accident. Before I was more willing to give my time to people and things that I wasn't as interested in because somehow I allowed myself to be brainwashed into being forced to work with other people or on other projects that I had no interest in. So simply, the accident gave me the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do.
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