Rufus Wainwright part 1

Rufus Wainwright (b. 1973 in New York), was born of musical royalty. His father, Loudon Snowden Wainwright III, is a Grammy-winning American songwriter, folk singer and actor. He was once heralded as Dylan's heir, but now we well know that people like Dylan, the Beatles, Elvis, Sinatra are irreplaceable.

His mother was Kate McGarrigle, a Canadian folk singer-songwriter, who formed a duo with her sister Anna. Their first record was chosen as Best Record of the Year 1976 by prominent British music paper Melody Maker. They also won 2 Juno awards (1996 & 1998). His sister, Martha Wainwright, is also a well respected singer-songwriter.

His parents divorced when he was three, and he lived with his mother in Montreal, Canada, for most of his youth. He began playing the piano at age six, and started touring at age 13 with "The McGarrigle Sisters and Family", a folk group featuring Rufus, his sister Martha, his mother Kate, and his aunt Anna.

Wainwright identified as gay while a teenager. At age 14, he had a very ugly experience in London, after picking up a man at a bar. In his own words: "I said I wanted to go to the park and see where this big concert was going on. I thought it was going to be a romantic walk in the park, but he raped me and robbed me afterwards and tried to strangle me". He survived only by faking a seizure. He has been reported to have stated that he remained celibate for five or seven years after the incident, and eventually became promiscuous.

He became addicted to crystal meth in the early 2000s and temporarily lost his vision. It was Elton John who helped him kick the habit. After a series of unhappy relationships, he found his life partner in Jorn Weisbrodt. They were married in 2012. A year before that, Rufus had a daughter (Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen) with Leonard Cohen's daughter Lorca.

Lenny Waronker signed Rufus to DreamWorks in 1996. His first album came out in 1998 and was called Rufus Wainwright. The reviews were mostly great. Rolling Stone named Wainwright the Best New Artist of 1998. The album earned him recognitions from the Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards and the Juno Awards.

The opening track, Foolish Love, is arranged by Van Dyke Parks. The song seems to be directly connected to the song that follows, Danny Boy. Together they represent the start and end of a relationship between a gay man (Rufus) and a straight man (Danny). Danny, the straight "drug-addled" title figure, was a man with whom Wainwright had a three-year relationship. In Foolish Love the relationship is still good, even though the singer can see where it's heading:

I don't want to hold you

And feel so helpless

I don't want to smell you

And lose my senses

And smile in slow motion

With eyes in love

I twist like a corkscrew

The sweetness rising

I drink from the bottle weeping

Why won't you last?

Why can't you last?

The video:

In Danny Boy, things have already taken a turn for the worse:

I was hanged at the doorstep, played like a two to a fourset

Had like poor Job in the bible by God

Day comes I wake, I wake with a hard heartache

I go down to your place

We sit and chat, chat about New York and trips to the bayou

My smile a trick, tricking me and trying not to scare you

And a ship with eight sails could come 'round the bend

Or a herd of bulls charging stop lights red

I'd be blind

You broke my heart Danny Boy

Not your fault Danny Boy

The video:

Barcelona is another song from this album that's worth noticing. The song is loosely about AIDS and contains the lyric "Fuggi, regal fantasima", taken from Verdi's opera "Macbeth". According to Wainwright, the line appears in a scene when "Macbeth is going mad and sees the ghost, and in [Wainwright's] mind the ghost was AIDS." Some of the lyrics:

The summer sun set a vicious circus

When shadows held the world in place

But today I felt a chill in my apartment's coolest place

Fuggi regal fantasima

The village larks cannot be heard

'Cause all the crows got panderers

I can't escape these velvet drapes

Don't want my rings to fall off my fingers

Fuggi regal fantasima

The mirror I find hard to face

'Cause I fear it's a long way down

Here's the video:

More on Rufus Wainwright tomorrow.