The stage has always been the destination for Claire Martine. Well, maybe not always. But definitely since her days with First Stage’s Young Company. She credits the theater organization with helping discover her voice, which at the time she used for other people’s lines and lyrics. Now, she’s singing her own.
A few things happened in between, most significantly a school-related move to New York. It’s from there that Martine just released her debut EP, Tough Luck, although plenty about southeastern Wisconsin still sticks with her.
“I miss the suburbs,” she told us, reflecting on her formative years growing up in Whitefish Bay. “I spent high school hanging out in my friends’ backyards and basements.”
Free time eventually transitioned to places like First Stage and Danceworks, Beans & Barley, the Oriental Theatre and Boswell Books. As those locations suggest, creative pursuits were never far from her mind.
“I was playing violin in orchestra and singing in the school musicals,” she recalled. “I was certainly listening to a lot of music, but I wasn’t writing my own yet. Whenever I tried, it was awful. I was finally able to write music in my junior year of college, once I had learned enough guitar to feel comfortable playing around with chords.”
Martine also shouted out someone from back home who had a thing or two to say about her musical development: “Dori Zori! She has some great taste in music. I’m so glad that she was the soundtrack to the morning drive. I think alt-J is the first band that really rocked my world on Radio Milwaukee when I was younger. I remember thinking, ‘What is THIS?!?!’”
It was a full-circle moment, then, when 88Nine started playing “Gossip Baby,” the infectious second single from Tough Luck. The track is a prime example of Martine leaning into what she called “the Y2K sound” — something she manages to capture on the EP despite, technically speaking, not being alive when Y2K happened.
“It’s so fun to write with that sound and style in mind,” she said. “I like writing catchy melodies with lyrics that are either nostalgic and bittersweet, or angsty and ironic. I didn’t realize it until after writing the EP, but the four songs on Tough Luck are each about wanting to feel included — or probably more about wanting to be accepted as I am. They’re like journal entries, my letters to myself.”
Now, they’re out in the world for everyone to read (or hear). You can find Tough Luck on your preferred streaming service now.
