christina martin photo by sarah jamer
Multi-award winning singer-songwriter Christina Martin is throwing a huge release party for her sixth studio album, Impossible to Hold (2018), September 14th at the Marquee Ballroom in Halifax. It is the biggest show Martin (who currently lives in Port Howe, Nova Scotia) has ever put on, and she is extremely pumped about it. We sat down over warm beverages at Lion and Bright on September 4th and talked about the upcoming show, her new album, songwriting, and having the courage, and the tools, to talk about the tough stuff we encounter, both on our journey to find and be ourselves, and also in the complexities of our relationships with others.
She is very excited about her upcoming collaboration with Wasco AV, “a multimedia and creative technology studio [based in Halifax] specializing in projection, production and motion graphics design.” They will be adding new, creative elements to this show with her band. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Wasco AV is all about creating unique, creative spaces specific to a project.” She mentions that she grew up going to the theatre, her parents took her to see plays at the Fredericton Playhouse, and that she has always been interested in the amalgamation of a rock show and the technical aspects of the theatre, which affect the way you hear and feel what is being performed.
The aspect of Martin’s music that continually strikes me is her eloquent and poetic lyrics, so I was curious about her writing process. “I usually start off in the old fashioned way,” she says, “I write with pencil and paper, usually lined paper. I journal a lot. I have a lot of pieces of words and lyrics that I keep until a time comes when I go back in time and sift through, and decide what is garbage and what isn’t. Sometimes I’m more formal about it, and I’ll sit down with my blank page, and my stack of ideas and try to find the one that resonates with me the most that day, and try to see what comes of it. I’ll have a piano and my acoustic, and I’ll just play through it. Sometimes, I have stuff that I’ve kept for years that is just waiting for the right time. Other times, I will be driving alone and listening to other music and I hear something in a rhythm that triggers something in me. It’s not even an identical rhythm or melody, it triggers something completely different. If you don’t follow that inspiration right away, you are liable to lose the opportunity to write either an entire song, or, I’ve gone from listening to a song, being inspired by a rhythm, and then taking that and writing five different little ideas and chopping them up and having three different songs come from it.” But, she stresses, “not all in one day. Sometimes, it’s the lyrics that lead the rest of the music and sometimes it’s the music that dictates the melody and then a word or a line that dictates the whole storyline, and that storyline can evolve over time too. Sometimes, it’s just a jumbling of all this stuff, but the goal is to have a very clear feeling and message in the end for three minutes and thirty seconds.”
Martin speaks about how the meanings in her lyrics can be fluid. “After a song is written, I wrote it, I might play it one year and then play it again the next year, and something has happened in between that changes what the song means to me. Maybe I’ve lost touch with the initial inspiration or meaning behind it, and it becomes something else based on more recent experiences. As a songwriter, you know that other people are listening to the lyrics and they’re connecting them to their own lives too. Sometimes what you wrote about and what other people are connecting on is the same thing, but I think often it isn’t and that’s one of the really neat things about music.” She hopes that the songs on Impossible to Hold speak to her audience more universally.
She relates that she worries sometimes that by telling people what the song is about, it ruins the potential for them to connect with it in their own way and I agree. She mentions that for her, when she is singing the title track of the new album, she is singing it to her idols. “I’m singing this song, dreaming about these iconic singer-songwriters that inspired me and how I’m trying to embody an ounce of them because they were so incredible, so I’m stealing their energy to get the courage to sing. Growing up, I wanted to be like these people. I still do.”
Martin grew up in New Brunswick, and spent her formative years watching MTV and becoming infatuated with pop and rock idols like Michael and Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Prince and Madonna, and also Bryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie. She then took some time as a teenager to focus more on school athletics, and then got into the rave scene because she loved to dance. When she moved to Austin, Texas in 1999 she says she “fell into songwriting and was exposed to Americana music.” There, she was introduced to artists like Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lucinda Williams, Shawn Colvin and Patty Griffin and she “fell in love with their storytelling ability, mixed with these pop elements.” Being in Austin, Martin now had the opportunity to see some of her new role models perform, and in 2002 she opened for Wilco, which at the time she considered, “the highlight of my career… on like, Day #2 of my career,” she adds with a laugh. “Now that I’m older,” she says, “I keep going back to Eurythmics, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac. “They’re the ones I keep going back and back to. I look at their careers and what they’ve been able to accomplish, not just in music, Annie Lennox (for example) is one of the world’s greatest rock singers, she’s also an activist, and she doesn’t seem to give a shit about what everyone else is doing. She is just following her own train.”
Martin doesn’t consider herself an activist, but she does use her voice and her platform as a singer-songwriter to talk about issues that resonate with her and her own experiences. “Lungs Are Burning,” the first single from her new record, has been called a “fervent anthem for those who are lost and longing” and the writing was triggered by the rising Fentanyl drug crisis that killed nearly 4,000 people (92% of which were accidental overdoses) in Canada last year alone. Martin lost her brother to an opioid overdose in 2013 and says, “At the time when this song was written I had just read about the Fentanyl overdose crisis in Canada, and now the world, and it resonated with me in all kinds of uncomfortable ways because I am still dealing with grief, with the loss of a brother, and I’m still not really, fully, understanding what my role was in his loss, and feeling like I was responsible, even though people like to say that we’re not responsible, that it’s up to the individual, I still feel like we’re all kind of responsible, that there are things that we can do, that there were things I could have done.” Martin says that her brother lived with mental illness, which she came to see was part of a familial cycle, but, she realized, that in the past these tough issues in her family were never discussed, and there were no diagnoses from doctors, so this resulted in a pattern of alcoholism, addiction and secrecy. In 2016 Martin was given the opportunity to promote the work of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Based in Toronto, this mental health teaching hospital is also one of the world’s leading research centres in its field. She and her husband (musician and music producer Dale Murray) signed up to be “Change Agents,” people who give $25.00 a month to CAMH and whose role is to “help eliminate the stigma around addiction and mental health, which means engaging people in conversations about the topic and sharing stories if you have them.” Martin says that she thinks it’s helpful to share both stories of struggle, but also ones of triumph and recovery. “I can share my story about my brother,” she says, “I wish I had had the tools that I have now back then, I think the tools are certainly out there and CAMH is certainly very willing to help families learn how to approach these issues with more compassion and love, because they are complex issues.” She stresses that she is not a doctor, but adds, “I think we can break these cycles, but we have to start talking about it and we have to do so in a compassionate way.” As part of her role as a “Change Agent” Martin talks about CAMH from the stage at her shows, saying, “To have a greater purpose that is tied to your work is a privileged and a great opportunity, so I do what I can. I’d like to do even more.”
Her interests in connecting with her audience are not all quite as serious, however. She also has come up with the great idea of offering a VIP Package for 13 people which includes a 10 minute VIP Limo Ride with the band before the show. The first 400 People to Join the Facebook Event / Purchase Tickets qualify to win 2 VIP Backstage Passes AND a VIP Limo Service with the band prior to the performance. Martin says she kept coming back to the idea, possibly inspired by reading about David Bowie riding around exclusively in limousines when he lived in New York City, and thinking that it had the potential to be so much fun. “It’s quite a way to start the show, for me, I’ve never done that before. Usually you’re backstage and your bored out of your mind and waiting is the hardest part (said Tom Petty). I’m pumped. I want the audience to think, ‘I’m so glad I went out to see live music! This stuff should happen more often.’”
You can join Christina Martin at the release party for her powerful and poetic new album, Impossible to Hold (nominated for three 2018 Music Nova Scotia Awards), at the Marquee Ballroom Friday night in Halifax. The show also features special guest, Villages, a folk group from Cape Breton, and Christina Martin is joined by her powerhouse band. You don’t want to miss her biggest show to date!
