Interesting article about Rufus Wainwright in this Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/13/PKG0UPJQ411.DTL&hw=WAINWRIGHT&sn=001&sc=1000Life in a different light
Neva Chonin
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Last year or thereabouts, Rufus Wainwright -- gay messiah, rebel prince, pop star -- was riding through the Austrian Alps with his boyfriend when inspiration struck.
"All of a sudden," he recalls, "I sat up in the car and started singing the song that became 'Release the Stars.' It was a possession, like a light shining off of a glacier had blinded me."
That song, about his friend Lorca Cohen (daughter of Leonard Cohen), also became the title track for an album that might be the most significant in Wainwright's brief and still brilliant career.
At least this is how Wainwright tells it, sitting in the Hotel Palomar's fifth-floor lobby, delicately slurping from a bowl of potato soup. With his soft, brown eyes, dark, flopping hair and deep burgundy dress shirt, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter resembles an elegantly sartorial fawn: two parts Nijinsky, one part Bambi, with a dish of Debussy on the side.
It's April 13, and Wainwright is in San Francisco to play a gig at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, previewing material from "Release the Stars," which will be in stores Tuesday. (He returns Aug. 4 for a show at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga.) It's his fifth studio album (see review on Page 44), and the first Wainwright has produced himself, with some oversight by the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant.
The past year has seen other firsts for Wainwright. In June, his audacious decision to perform Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall concert album in its entirety over two nights in that same venue made him the hottest ticket of the season. Then the New York Metropolitan Opera commissioned Wainwright, a lifelong aficionado of divas and their art, to write his first opera.
In an interview with the British newspaper the Observer last year, Wainwright listed his top 10 gay icons. Now he's a gay icon, who's had his share of encounters with young acolytes who seek him out hoping he'll provide meaning to their lives, or, barring that, a quick roll in the starry hay.
"Thank God I have a boyfriend now, or I'd just be a molester," Wainwright says of his partner of two years, Jörn Weisbrodt, concert manager for the Berlin State Opera. "I'm really happy with my status in terms of encouraging young gay people, but I feel that my main enemy in that spectrum is actually gay culture -- I'm probably more critical of gay culture than I am of fundamentalist Christian culture. I worry about these kids who grow up in the Midwest, move to New York or L.A. and go from the frying pan into the fire. Yes, they're getting away from their parents, but then they're being surrounded by consumerized beauty and fascistic body insanity."
A waiter arrives bearing a plate of pan-fried grouper.
"It used to be different," Wainwright says, tentatively poking the fish. "There was a period when you ran away from the Midwest and went to New York to live as a gay man, and it really was an incredibly meaningful, even spiritual experience. Now it's all homogenous homosexuality, and that's almost worse than ending up in the closet. I don't think that being gay always has to be bizarre and interesting, but I do think that in life in general you should try to edify yourself."
By fate or plan, Wainwright's own life has never failed to be bizarre, interesting and occasionally perilous. Six years ago, the singer's fierce addiction to crystal meth had friends and family convinced he wouldn't live to see his 30th birthday. At one point, he literally didn't see anything -- the drug had caused him to go temporarily blind. His debauches included a lost week of partying with presidential daughter Barbara Bush, his mother and Marianne Faithfull; sundry sex scenes "with 20 naked people in my apartment and me in my bathrobe playing his ode to addiction, 'Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.' "
Finally, something -- blindness, maybe, or partying with George W. Bush's daughter, or simply too many naked people -- convinced Wainwright he needed help. He called his friend Elton John, who helped him check into rehab at Minnesota's Hazelden Foundation for detox and therapy. Wainwright got clean and went on to write his two critically acclaimed "Want" albums.
"I was definitely grappling with years of self-lacerating hatred when I went into the crystal meth palace," he says now of his live-fast-die-young period. "It was fueled by a little voice that was always with me when I went to nightclubs and fashion shows, saying, 'OK, whatever, I'm just a big, fat slob who nobody loves.' " Noticing my skepticism, he concedes, "I do feel that I'm more attractive now than I was in my 20s. For a long time, I was extremely gawky. And I have this thing where, if I do drugs and alcohol, I just start hating myself. Right away. It's just what happens to me." He pauses. "But it's OK." A longer pause. "For now, anyway."
If, at times, Wainwright's life seems to achieve drama of operatic proportions, it's probably because he has soaked up opera like a sponge. This should come in handy as he works on his commission for the Met, a work he calls "Prima Donna" that traces a day in the life of an opera singer. Together with several other commissioned operas, it will be workshopped and then performed at either the Met or the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Wainwright, of course, is hoping for the Met ("that's my mama ship").
"I'm almost finished with the first act," he says. "It's all piano and voice at the moment, so it's more sketches, really. I really believe that I will never accomplish the fully rounded operatic explosion that great composers like Wagner and Verdi did. That said, I do think I have something to offer that they didn't: I can sing. I can tell a good tune when I hear it, and that will help me a lot."
Opera aside, Wainwright's primary focus is "Release the Stars," an album he says signals a shift in his songwriting and aesthetic. Where earlier albums reveled in the singer's talent for droll introspection, on his new CD, he turns his gaze outward to contemplate other stars: Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Judy Garland.
"How great it would have been if they'd been released from their contracts and been allowed to live their own lives instead of being slaves to Hollywood?" he says. "I guess, in the end, the bigger meaning of the title is that it's time to break the contracts and let the crazy people roam and love and do what they need to do. It's about taking action, in terms of release -- if you need to kill your sister, kill your sister. If you want to save the planet, save the planet. Whatever. Just do it.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures" he continues, "and what I think needs to be imbued into young people is that no, it's not going to be handed to you on a silver platter. You're going to have to fight for it, and in the end it'll make you a stronger and more interesting person."
On past albums, Wainwright says, he was "really into the crepuscular, vapory sensibility of being the waifish prince. I love that whole period of my life, but this is more like, 'Let's sit down. I need to talk to you.' When you engage with someone, that's when you actually show them who you are, not when you're trapped in your own mire."
Metaphorically and technically, then, Wainwright is now his own producer. What's the best part about this new role? He smirks.
"I don't have to pay myself."
Self-obsessed and self-lacerating. Crepuscular. Rufus Wainwright is a star in his own light.
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Rufus Wainwright: His latest disc, "Release the Stars," is not the sort of album that will draw in the casual listener, but it's Wainwright's most user-friendly offering yet. Review, Page 44.
E-mail Neva Chonin at
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