Martha Wainwright, a singer-songwriter who proudly defies easy categorisation, has just been struggling with a magazine questionnaire asking her to name what’s on her iPod. “I know I shouldn’t really say this,” she confides softly, “but I don’t have an iPod. I don’t really know who is new and who is coming up. I have been living in the past. My tendency is to listen to people who are dead.”

Popular musicians are rarely so dismissive of their own time. It goes against the grain: their art form revolves shrilly, occasionally explosively, around the here and now. Evanescence is part of the charm. Who gives the clip of a hi-hat about legacy?

But Wainwright, part of a dynasty of free-thinking musicians – brother Rufus, father Loudon, mother Kate McGarrigle – is immersed in the idea of heritage. She is in London putting the final touches to her musical tribute to a figure who stood alone and apart from the mainstream, but whose extraordinary theatrics continue to capture public imagination.

Not many performers have the gall to tackle Edith Piaf, I say.

She sits, poised and composed, expecting her first child at 33, on a sofa in her record company’s office in north London, and couldn’t appear less like her subject. It was not her idea, she says. “My first inclination was to say no, of course. She was amazing, untouchable.” But then she began to feel her way into the project. “I was sent about 300 songs of hers, many of which I had never heard. I was a lazy fan. But I thought it would be great to shed some light on these lesser-known songs, as some kind of tribute to the writers, and to the genre.”

The result is a new CD, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris – Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record, and a live show making its London debut at the Barbican on November 11 as part of the venue’s chanson season. She is surely mindful of the dangers of identifying herself with one of the most charismatic performers of all time?

“You know, she tends to show up even when you are not trying to evoke her. It is because the songs are so connected to her. She would ask everyone she knew to write songs for her, friends, poets, journalists. They dealt with subjects that were reflected in her own life. And I think it must have helped her to be so entrenched in them. That’s how she could throw herself into them so fully, with total abandon.”

It sounded like the opposite of the cynically-crafted pop music of today.

“Exactly. I can’t write a hit.” (This is said with no perceptible sense of regret.) “It is not how I perceive songs. The chanson is all about telling a proper narrative story, tackling big subjects like religion or the fear of death, trying to encapsulate that feeling. It is not worrying about whether the hook works.”

There were some good hooks, though: I talk about my cherished ’78 pressing of “La Vie En Rose”, handed down to me by my father. “That wasn’t going to be released,” she says a little feistily. “She had to fight for it to come out. It is a good indication of how record companies get it wrong. Sometimes.”

. . .

It is easy and convenient to see Wainwright’s career as that of a musically promiscuous maverick, declining to settle in any one direction, searching for the perfect vehicle for her gifts. But today’s musical landscape, horribly disfigured by reality shows and infantilism, is desperate for the kind of musical intelligence and good taste that she possesses. Her apparent idiosyncrasies seem in touch with her times.

Earlier this year, she appeared at Covent Garden with the Royal Ballet, singing Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins; next year she is working with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon on a new song-cycle of her own. “It is a dream come true,” she says of a life that enables her to take dance classes “with some of the greatest dancers in the world”. She takes gleeful relish in the profession’s failed attempts to pigeonhole her. “Not only am I not a pop singer, and not a folk singer, but I get to sing Edith Piaf and I do Kurt Weill with the Royal Ballet – f*** you!”

In the meantime there is a family tradition to observe: the annual Christmas concert which this year comes to London’s Royal Albert Hall, featuring, like an extended Christmas lunch at home, a stream of incongruous friends and relatives: Boy George (“a good friend of Rufus”), Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. “It’s not about starf***ing,” says Wainwright forcefully, “it is family connections.”

One absent friend is Leonard Cohen, whose songs Wainwright interprets with consummate craft in Lian Lunson’s film documentary I’m Your Man. “Not many people can say that they know Leonard Cohen,” she says with no little pride, “but his daughter happens to be one of my best friends.”

The recent Cohen revival is logical to her. “Everything has happened in the second half of his life, it’s no surprise that he is a superstar at 75. In a way it is very comforting. Most people are obsessed by what they need to do by the age of 35. Maybe time is the answer.”

More of an answer, anyhow, than cramming an iPod full of the flotsam of contemporary pop. Wainwright is still clinging to her dead people. “People are thinking that the old stuff is hip again. They want to be involved with it.”

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden