The Wainright Stuff

In terms of human interaction, the journalist-musician interview must be one of the most unusual, nerve-wracking and otherworldly dialogues it’s possible to have. For 20 minutes, an artist has an unusually intimate conversation with a stranger, effectively exposing their secrets and thoughts to someone that they will most likely never see again and probably not even remember. Sounds like fun, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Fortunately for me, Rufus Wainwright is every bit as audacious, entertaining and profoundly intelligent an interviewee as he is an artist. Like his album Want One, Wainwright is grandiose in spirit, effete, colourful – to borrow one of his own lyrics, “a little bit heiress, a little bit Irish”.
This afternoon he is in a rather sunny mood, armed with a quick wit and self-deprecating humour. Much of his feelgood factor may have to do with the fact that he is currently touring with his mother Kate McGarrigle, aunt Anna McGarrigle, and sister Martha Wainwright.
“It’s functioning on dysfunction,” he laughs about the current family road show. “We’re not afraid to express our emotions with each other. It can be quite exhausting, but better than when you pretend as though everything is fine. Still, no matter how good I am – and I am very good! – there’s no physical way of matching what happens when a family sings together and it works.”
Needless to say, music was a huge part of his childhood.
“My mother and father (Loudon Wainwright III) divorced when I was 3,” he recalls. “If my mother had moved to a more urban environment near show-business, I would have been a lot more in touch with the abnormality of the situation. Fortunately she moved back to Canada and we were brought up in Montreal. I always knew we were different from other families, but we weren’t known at all for being famous because we weren’t French. Oddly enough it was quite sheltered and normal. But there was music constantly in the house. My grandmother required us to provide a constant stream of songs and shenanigans to entertain her.”
His Irish roots have certainly found a way into his artistry.
“I was brought up in very Catholic schools but we weren’t baptised, though we would go to Mass and couldn’t get confession or communion. It was all very… operatic. My father’s side are very WASP-y, very uptight, very no-bullshit, and then my mother’s side is more gypsy-esque. I definitely feel it on both sides.”
How does he think his parents would describe the young Rufus?
“I was pretty precocious… I was a flamboyant toddler,” he laughs. “I had a lamb called Toto; I wanted to be Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz all the time. I even had a little apron. I would constantly say to my mother ‘I want to put on a play’. She would be talking with a friend and she would say, ‘Okay Rufus, we’ll do Waiting For Godot. Now you’re Godot, and you wait outside’. I’d be out there for hours… I was so willing and gullible, it was kind of heartbreaking. Growing up, I felt a bit like Alfalfa from the Lil’ Rascals, singing at the top of my voice, quite dorky. But let’s say I grew into a swan.”
It was during his turbulent adolescence that the germination of his often-dark musical style began.
“When I was a teenager, a lot was going on in my personal life,” he recalls. “I realised I was gay, AIDS was becoming predominant, and there was a sense that if you were gay you were going to die. My world became extremely dark. One night I listened to Verdi’s ‘Requiem”’ and various Puccini arias, and it was all I listened to in the following six years. It was like I completely reverted to another century. I guess that’s the core of my music, the whole emotional warfare that opera is about.”
Speaking of warfare, getting his record company to shell out close to $700,000 for Want One was surprisingly easy.
“I was signed by the president of the company (Lenny Waronker),” he explains. “He wrote the cheques and didn’t have anyone to answer to. What I did was economic suicide, and I won’t see money for years, but I do have a great album. I do feel that it’s important to have records out there that are good. Because people don’t get to spend those kind of budgets these days, I felt it was my duty to make an expensive record.”
Of course, Waronker also counted Elliott Smith among his charges, and soon the discussion arises as to whether Wainwright felt an artistic affinity with the troubled singer-songwriter.
“I knew Elliott, but I always felt that with him, Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain, you can hear in their works that they were going to die. With Jeff Buckley it’s not so much in his song-writing, but I think he was singing his swansong most of the time. I adore their music, but I’m happy that I don’t share that hopeless and dark aspect with them. My stuff is a little more hopeful, a little more triumphant over the darkness. I can’t be totally nihilistic anymore; I’m too happy right now.”

23rd Street Lullaby is out now on Sony Records.