Thanks to our own John Gallagher, here's a link to the latest article about Rufus. And also thanks to John, newyearsday and I are going to accompany him to see Rufus in Central Park this August!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/arts/music/04wain.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=slogin
The Superfabulous World of Rufus WainwrightBy MELENA RYZIK
Published: June 4, 2007
A few weeks ago, on his way to an appearance at the Union Square Barnes & Noble to promote his new album, “Release the Stars,” Rufus Wainwright decided his all-black outfit was a little dour for a meet-and-greet. “Fashion emergency!” he said. So he dashed down to the antique-jewelry shop below his apartment and picked up a 1920s Czech glass necklace, which sparkled atop his black T-shirt.
Good thing too: Mr. Wainwright’s fans expect a little flash. Around 800 of them came, some lining up as early as noon for a 7 p.m. appearance, to see him perform and autograph their CDs. Afterward they lingered, snapping photos of him and discussing their devotion.
“I’ve learned a lot about myself listening to his music,” one man gushed.
Does Rufus Wainwright know he’s fabulous?
“I do feel like I live a fabulous life,” he said over afternoon dumplings at a Japanese teahouse near the Gramercy Park home he shares with his new boyfriend, Jörn Weisbrodt, an arts administrator. “And I know that’s why a lot of the critics get so mad at me sometimes, because they’re just really jealous.”
He must be expecting an onslaught, because Mr. Wainwright, 33, the singer-songwriter-rhinestone-lover, has been superfabulous lately. His re-creation of Judy Garland’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert garnered praise and awe, and he received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. “Release the Stars” immediately became a best seller in Britain when it arrived last month and has been a critical hit in the United States. He did five sold-shows at the Old Vic in London, and tomorrow he will begin a run of four sold-out nights at the Blender Theater at Gramercy in Manhattan.
In New York he was in the midst of a publicity — and fashion — blitz: The night after Barnes & Noble he appeared on “Late Show With David Letterman” wearing lederhosen he had custom-made in Austria by a 25th-generation artisan who also fitted the Porsche family.
But the glam life is not without pitfalls. Watching that show with a few friends from a private dining room at the boutique Hotel on Rivington, Mr. Wainwright had an epiphany: “It’s all commercials. It’s horrifying how many commercials there are and how it just ruins the experience.”
But, he was quick to add, “I’d still love to be on ‘Oprah’ and, you know, have them visit my crib or whatever.”
Scale has always been a tricky issue for Mr. Wainwright. Though he casually refers to himself as a superstar — in a tone that’s a few notes short of irony — his last few albums were more like cult hits. In the United States “Release the Stars,” which had its debut at No. 23 on the Billboard charts with just over 24,000 copies sold, was his highest ranking; by contrast the new album from another indie favorite, Wilco, came in at No. 4 that week. And it was only recently that he became too well known to have a profile posted on a gay cruising site. (The administrators took it down, thinking it was fake.)
In the United States and Britain his most loyal audience tends to be gay men, teenagers and mother-daughter fans. (Several sets turned up at Barnes & Noble.) “There’s a tinge of sadness to their devotion,” he said. “It relates with the alienation that I bring up. So I still feel somewhat subversive, which is nice.”
To promote that approach “Release the Stars” was meant to have an underground feel, recorded in Brooklyn with a Berlin detour to “go totally electroclash, get a weird haircut and maybe take up drug addiction again or something,” Mr. Wainwright said. Instead, when he got to Germany, “this kind of wave of, like, romanticism and grandiosity and sort of high culture really took hold of me,” he said.
His critics — the jealous ones — might suggest he has always been in thrall to ostentation, so Mr. Wainwright enlisted Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys to rein him in. It worked, sort of. “Remarkably, Mr. Wainwright infuses ‘Release the Stars’ with enough honest emotion to overcome the grandiosity, or at least undercut it a bit,” the critic Nate Chinen wrote in The New York Times.
Mr. Wainwright would like to make a solo piano record, and several albums with his musical family. (His parents are the folkies Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III; his sisters, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche, often join his tours.) But he talks most excitedly — and most often — about his opera, a tale of a (fabulous) day in the life of a diva.
“I really believe that opera’s a language,” he said. “I think it’s a whole parallel, separate world where all those characters exist. And once a composer of opera realizes that or discovers who those people are, as I have with this character who I’m writing about, it’s your mission to breathe life into this other being.”
So Mr. Wainwright is in no danger of deflating. What would make his life more fabulous? “I’d love to play Madison Square Garden,” he said, “and get hounded and lose all sense of dignity.”