LI's Martha Wash releasing her first album since 2013
Martha Wash performs during the Concert for America: Stand Up, Sing Out! at Town Hall in 2017 in midtown Manhattan. Credit: WireImage / John Lamparski
Singer Martha Wash, of Baldwin, whose vocals on "It's Raining Men" and "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" made her a dance-music star, is releasing her first full-length solo album since 2013's "Something Good."
"Love and Conflict," due out Jan. 6 on her own Purple Rose label and not yet available for preorder, dropped its first single, "Never Enough Money," on SoundCloud in late November. In the anthem against greed and avarice, she belts out, "You think you're trending now / And everybody's going 'Wow!' / If all you want is more / Then I'll show you the door/ You tweet and troll us all — can't you be sweet / There's never enough money in the world for you."
"My producers took me out of my comfort zone and into a new musical direction and the results are both uplifting and thought-provoking," Wash, 65, told Rolling Stone, which called the song "a stomping, rough-around-the-edges blues rocker anchored by a righteous vocal performance." "I think that everyone will relate to the lyrics on this album and each listener will get their own message from the music,” the Grammy Award nominee added.
In October, the San Francisco-born Wash said on the Ultimate Disco Cruise website that she was then finishing the album, which she described as "a gumbo of music because it's a little rock, a little pop, it's a little '60s kind of psychedelic. I never wanted to be pigeonholed into one genre of music … I just like different kinds of music because that's what I grew up on."
Wash began her career as a backup singer for disco star Sylvester in the 1970s, then broke out with the late Izora Armstead in the duo The Weather Girls. Their 1982 hit "It's Raining Men" became a club staple, and later the signature song of Channing Tatum's male-stripper troupe in his movie "Magic Mike" (2012). When her standout vocals on songs including C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" went uncredited, Wash became an artists' advocate who helped to spearhead a federal law mandating proper music credit.
