I wouldn’t fancy being a mate of Rufus Wainwright’s. Not that the songwriter seems particularly unfriendly or unfeeling – quite the opposite. It’s just that you’d constantly be worried that anything you did or said to him could end up as a song.
His dad (Loudon Wainwright III) gets a serious and very public ear-bashing on the uncomfortably voyeuristic ‘Dinner At Eight’, while someone called ‘Natasha’ even gets a song named after her: while it is wrenchingly gorgeous, I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be if I was the eponymous heroine of the title.
Having said that, many of his compositions are of a more general nature, like the mesmerising opening track ‘Oh What A World’, where the life-affirming oompah of the limpet-like melody is countered by the more melancholy musings of the lyrics. US foreign policy comes in for a bashing on ‘I Don’t Know What It Is’, where Rufus declares how he’s “Sick of looking around at friendly faces/ All declaring war on far off places”.
But most of these songs are disarmingly personal, cataloguing a series of relationships and their fall-outs, from the tender, sad ‘Vicious World’ to the self-effacement of ‘Pretty Things’. ‘14th Street’ juxtaposes a broken-hearted narrative with the kind of brassy singalong not usually heard outside Broadway. Then there’s the addictive jazz-inflected ‘Harvester Of Hearts’ and the brilliant ‘11:11’, which reads like you’re leafing through someone else’s photograph album.
While his voice might be an acquired taste, there is no disputing the quality of Rufus Wainwright’s compositions. And the pristine production on Want One should see his fan-base increase exponentially, each song having been polished to the point where it sounds like a shiny, radio-friendly gem, until you dig below the surface to the murkier, emotionally dense subject matter underneath.