On song: a debilitating illness won’t stop Martha Marlow sharing her talent with the world

When a devastating illness forced Martha Marlow to quit art school and stop performing music, she had to find a new way to share her talents with the world.

You may not realise it, but you already know and love the honey-toned voice of Aussie singer-songwriter Martha Marlow. In 2014, she brought the perfect dash of longing to Randy Newman’s Feels Like Home for a moving series of Qantas ads. Martha’s rendition was praised as “soul-stirring”, but it might never have existed if her talent hadn’t touched the heart of one of the world’s greatest living composers.

The story goes that the ad campaign’s creative director, Neil Lawrence, had asked several artists to record versions of Feels Like Home to help him convince Newman to grant him permission to use the song.

In a moment of inspiration, Neil asked the daughter of a friend how she would perform it. Martha was only 21, but she had a reputation for finding the emotional core of a piece of music. So, in their garage, Martha and her father, jazz musician Jonathan Zwartz, recorded a stripped-back, melancholy version of the song.

“I tend to put most things into alternate tuning. It’s quite an intuitive process, finding the right chords and trying to tap into the feeling of the song,” Martha explains. “I don’t have music theory, I don’t know how to read music – everything is self-taught. It’s a process of finding and listening and using my ears.”

Neil travelled to LA to present Newman with several variations of the song. First, he played those by the professional artists. “[Randy] said, I don’t think these versions do it justice,” recalls Martha’s mother, Jane.

Undeterred, Neil played Martha’s home recording. “Randy was sitting there with his hand on his head, and Neil thought, ‘He hates it’,” Jane says. “Then Randy said: ‘She’s got it’.”

Martha adds: “He said, ‘This girl really feels it, she really means it’.”

Qantas used the recording that Martha and Jonathan had made at home, adding only some strings. The piece Australians know and love retains the quiet intimacy of the father-daughter collaboration that has shaped Martha’s life and art.

Her parents are both musicians, and she was raised in a house alive with creative zeal. Jane writes songs for children’s show Play School, while Jonathan is an ARIA Award winner. Martha’s grandfather played violin on The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“I’d fall asleep in my dad’s double bass case,” Martha says, recalling her younger years. “He’s got this huge double bass case and it’s so soft. We’d go to rehearsals and I just remember crawling into that. It’s what I’ve always known, so it was normal. As I got older, I realised how bohemian it was. I’ve always been an outsider.”

Martha was destined to carve her own distinct path. She was born with bilateral talipes, a congenital foot abnormality known as club foot, which meant she endured painful operations as a child.

While other kids were running around at recess, she sat and quietly read or drew. “She charged through anyway,” Jane says proudly.

But Martha always preferred painting or playing a song to sport, and she was enthralled by her father’s music.

“She would pursue him around the house. She just practised a lot and figured it out,” Jane says.

Martha always had adult tastes. Jazz, naturally, but also a curious predilection for Brazilian bossa nova. “One album she loved, which was really weird, was [Antônio Carlos] Jobim – you know, The Girl from Ipanema,” Jane laughs.

Martha wanted to learn to compose and she found encouragement in the Bondi WAVE program that paired teens with mentors like Brendan Gallagher, from Karma County.

“It was an incredibly liberating and profound experience because all of these old rockers, who’d lived their music, were imparting incredible advice, and you were taken very seriously,” Martha says.

She and her brother Henry would spend Sundays performing with their father at iconic eatery Cafe Sydney. “That was the perfect milestone to have in the diary, to be writing new material for every week,” Martha adds.

She opened a sold-out gig to launch her father’s album, then toured with the likes of Katie Noonan and Clare

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to play or paint again.”

Bowditch. She was accepted into the National Art School to learn painting – her other great love – and she began writing and recording songs.

After Newman heard Martha’s take on Feels Like Home, she was whisked to LA, where he took her to breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car. “It looks like a railway carriage from the 1800s, it’s plush velvet. He’s got a wonderful sense of humour, so it was a really special experience. I’ll hold on to that memory forever,” Martha says.

She performed in the US, and was invited to sing with the Australian Girls Choir in an aeroplane hangar for a Qantas gala celebration. It should have been the most exciting experience of her young life, but it collided with the beginning of the worst. A dark and sinister force was taking hold.

The night before the gala, Martha’s shoulder had become dislocated, and her joy was dimmed by crippling pain. Backstage footage captures her confidently leading the choir in a rehearsal, but under her dress she was strapped with bandages. “I had to go to hospital the day before. It was so painful,” she recalls.

The only person she confided in was actor and Qantas ambassador John Travolta. “I hadn’t told anyone, but I was in terrible pain and he wanted to give me a hug. He was very kind.”

Martha got through the night, but her trouble was just beginning. The dislocated shoulder was a sign of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which manifests as joint hypermobility and tissue fragility, and is part of a complex constellation of symptoms that add up to an autoimmune disorder that is not fully understood.

“It was almost a death sentence,” she has said previously. “Especially when I have terrible issues with my hands … I thought I wouldn’t be able to play or paint again. It started to derail [my work] and I became deeply depressed. I remember putting a white sheet over all my paints. My world became very, very small.”

Martha’s illness forced her to drop out of art school, but when she’s well enough, she still paints. One wall of her parents’ sitting room is covered with her paintings of the sea and dark cliffs, rendered in indigo, steely-grey and white.

She is fortunate, she says, that this private well of creativity has sustained her. “There have been some dark days with it, just the not knowing,” she says. “Lots of time in hospital, lots of medication. I’m on daily injections. It certainly derailed the public way of pursuing a very active career.”

Yet, Martha had the will to find a way forward. “I’m not going to be hopping on a tour bus and going around, but it has opened up new opportunities,” she says.

Despite her health issues, Martha has found a way to put her work out into the world. In May this year, she released her debut album, Medicine Man, and is hopeful that her unique point of view will offer solace and inspiration to others.

“I’m hoping that it resonates with people. I’m hoping that it moves people and that people are open to accepting me as I am, which is to say vulnerable,” she adds finally.

“I think that speaks to many people who are living with diseases or who are disabled. There are so many of us and you feel like there isn’t a path for you. Looking beyond myself,

I think this album is important in the cultural landscape of Australia.”