Martha Marlow - Harper's BAZAAR
Musician and painter Martha Marlow has had a whirlwind 12 months, putting out her debut album, working on a second, and holding her first solo art show. Here, she talks about finding beauty in pain and her new art-pop direction
Even if her name is unfamiliar, you will know her voice. In fact, you likely cried to it as she sang “Feels Like Home” in that tear-jerker Qantas ad about a family reuniting for Christmas. Six years later on her debut album, 2021’s Medicine Man, Martha Marlow’s voice is still light and cloudy — Nora Jones-esque and laden with emotion, though it carries something new, too: a quiet power that’s hard to pinpoint in any one note or lyric but permeates every song.
Marlow’s gentleness belies her strength. The acclaimed 28-yearold Australian musician and painter lives almost every moment in indescribable pain. She has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a chronic autoimmune disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue. Symptoms include joint pain, dislocations, fatigue and dizziness, and she is in and out of hospital, enduring surgeries and recovery time. She was also born with bilateral talipes (also known as club foot), which means some days she’s in a wheelchair; others she uses a walking stick. “It’s a huge part of who I am,” she says. “I don’t wish to minimise how difficult it can be on a day-to-day basis living with disability, living with chronic illness, living with chronic pain, but at the same time the truth is that it too is this exceptional source of depth, because you’re so close to your humanity.”
As many great artists do, Marlow turns her suffering into art. She lives by a line written by Viktor Frankl in 1946: “Suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds its meaning.” “So much of great art and great music comes when people transcend their suffering,” she says. “It’s been important to try to have a career and perform and follow art, even though it is incredibly difficult.” At a recent Sydney performance, her hands were affected by her illness and she was unable to play the guitar. “I was honest with the audience and said, ‘I cannot play at present,’ and the warmth in that room ... We need vulnerability in our work, and it takes a tremendous amount of bravery to be vulnerable,” she says.
By cultivating a rich inner world, Marlow has been able to excel in both music and visual art, studying the latter at the National Art School. She majored in oil painting and won the drawing prize in her first year, but by her final year was increasingly unwell. She had already started writing the orchestral pop songs that would make up Medicine Man, picking up a guitar while she waited for the paint to dry. She has described it as one of the darkest yet most creatively fertile periods of her life. Four years later, in 2020, she was a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, and in 2021 her debut album was nominated for Best Blues and Roots Album at the ARIA Awards.
Marlow comes from a long line of lauded classical musicians: her mother, Jane Lindsay, is a singer, and her father, Jonathan Zwartz, is an ARIA-winning double bassist, string arranger and composer. Her maternal grandfather, Alexander Lindsay, is the former New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster and played the violin on the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. She grew up in Sydney’s east, in the house where the Bee Gees lived before they went to London. “I was raised in a household where music was always in the background and the foreground,” she says. “It was never enforced upon us, but it was absolutely a part of the walls. It was there for me to find — me and my brother, both.
A self-taught musician, Marlow also worked closely with her father on Medicine Man, which featured a 17-piece string ensemble arranged by Zwartz, led by Véronique Serret and conducted by Daniel Denholm. Her musical lineage has also imbued in her a passion for recording live. “It’s not commonly done like that anymore,” she says, “so there’s this sort of overarching sense of authenticity — to have a 17-piece string ensemble there in the same room at the same time, and me, playing and singing live and then choosing the best take.”
She has been working on a new album, Queen of the Night, in collaboration with Chris Abrahams of the improvisational avantgarde jazz band The Necks, which they will perform at Phoenix Central Park as part of Vivid Sydney on June 17. “I’m really looking forward to this because it’s quite different from Medicine Man,” she says. “I’m loath to say too much about it, to put an idea on it before it’s come out in the world. It’s sort of art-pop, that’s how I would describe it.” She will also have her first solo art exhibition at King Street Gallery in Sydney’s Darlinghurst. “The gallery isn’t interested in my musicality, which is really reassuring because it’s based on the merit of the work,” she says.
“Living in pain is very much living in a shadow world and living my life in my bedroom,” she says. “It’s a quiet, small life. I read somewhere once that the Milky Way casts a shadow of itself, and there is a certain beauty in that. I believe there is a richness to incompleteness, and I’m living my life in the shadow of the stars.”
This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Edward Mulvihill.
