CANADIAN singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright will play Pocklington Arts Centre on August 13 as part of an 11-date summer tour.

She is the daughter of folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle and the sister of baroque vocalist and composer Rufus Wainwright.

Born in New York and raised in Montreal, Martha, 37, grew up on stages with her family and has written original songs since her teens in a style both intimate and daring.

Her first EPs were issued in 2002, followed by her self-titled debut album in 2005, I Know You’re Married But I Have Feelings Too in 2008 and Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris: Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record, a concert recording of Edith Piaf songs from New York’s Dixon Palace Theatre, in 2010.

Martha released her latest album, Come Home To Mama, last October. Produced by Cibo Matto’s Yuka C Honda, her first studio set for four years featured guest musicians Sean Lennon and Brad Albetta, Martha’s husband, on bass, Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett on keyboards, Dirty Three’s Jim White on drums and Wilco’s Nels Cline, Yuka’s husband, on guitar.

The album’s cornerstones are Martha’s responses to two of life’s utmost extremes: the loss of her mother, Kate, to cancer in January 2010, and the birth of her son, Arcangelo, only two-and-a-half months earlier in London, England.

“His coming into life was at a very emotional time,” she says. “I went into labour while on stage. Arcangelo was born very premature, but because of this, he was able to meet my mother. His due date was actually the day that she died.”

Come Home To Mama is Martha’s most naked record to date. “The album fully encapsulates a time and me, in this time,” she says. “To come back to song-writing after stepping away from it for a bit with the Piaf project, and to write songs about the closest people in my life really brought me back to when I started writing songs at 16.

“Then, as now, I tried to capture, in some way, all of the feelings I was dealing with. So I allowed myself to be as honest as I could be, and tried to listen to my inner voice as I did when I was younger, rather than starting with any preconceived notions of the album’s sound or attempting to write something that would be popular in any way. All of that was taken away, and it seemed like a very pure experience.”

Once Martha committed herself to write new songs – having a babysitter come by a few days per week helped – she sensed she needed a different approach to the album’s production. She wanted to work with a producer who was also a musician and ideally a woman.

Husband Brad, who had produced Martha’s two earlier studio albums, suggested that she should link up with friend Yuka C. Honda, a multi-instrumentalist studio whiz.

Working together in the New York City home studio Honda shares with Sean Lennon, the two tapped into an adventurous set of sounds to lay bare Wainwright’s stories.

“Yuka really respected the genre of music that I make, but was able to add a more interesting dimension to it than I would have come up with myself,” says Martha. “I’m pleased with just how good we were to each other. We progressed in a gentler – perhaps female – way that was so refreshing and different than anything I had ever done before.”

At the heart of the album is All Your Clothes, on which Martha sings directly to mother Kate. “That was the first song that I wrote after she died,” she reveals. “It took a long time, but it was nice to have some sort of imagery to hang my feelings on, which in this case was clothing.”

Most poignant of all is the album’s only cover, Proserpina. “It’s the last song that my mother wrote; obviously she knew that she was in the last stages of her life,” says Martha.

“Kate started writing Proserpina” in the fall of 2009. It’s about Christmas in the sense that it’s about seasons. It’s the story of Persephone [or Proserpina in Roman mythology]. When Persephone’s mother, Ceres, tried to get her back from the underworld, she makes the earth cold and kills everything, which is why we have winter.

“So my mother was able to tie it into a seasonal song in her own weird and strange way. She was reading a lot of mythology in the last couple years of her life. The song is amazing, in and of itself, and the fact that the song is from a mother to a daughter made it all the more relevant for me to sing.”

At the opposite end of life’s journey, album closer Everything Wrong was written to baby Arcangelo. “That was the last song that I wrote for the album. It took maybe 20 minutes to write, which is never the case for me. I was obviously having a hard day, and it just came out. I wrote it through tears,” says Martha.

“It was very stream-of-consciousness writing, and that’s the way it’s recorded. The recording is of me showing the song to the musicians for the first time, and the tape happened to be rolling. That’s why you hear the count off. It has a sense like we’re all tripping along on this thing, and so I kept it in there like that. It’s imperfect, but reveals itself as it’s going along.”

Tickets for Martha’s 8pm show on August 13 are on sale on 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk