Rufus Wainwright

THE HISTORY
It is a peculiarity of the English language that the most profound human emotions are conveyed in the simplest of words – words like love, hate, find, lose, save, kill, need, want. Rufus Wainwright chose the last of these resonant four-letter words as the title for his third album. “I called the record ‘Want,’” he says, “because it sums up what I want.”
Wainwright’s album is actually titled Want One, which (along with whatever metaphorical notions the words suggest) indicates that this album is the first of two installments. Its projected companion, Want Two, will encompass the remainder of the tracks recorded for this project.
“Want One [due Sept. 23, 2003, on DreamWorks Records] is a presentable, accessible entity,” Wainwright explains. “Want Two will have some of the more daunting tracks, the operatic, weird stuff, some heavy numbers that relate to my classical sensibilities.” Not that the initial volume eschews the daunting, the weird or the heavy, all of which have emerged as distinctive arrows in Wainwright’s ambitious, gloriously stylish musical quiver.
The singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist elaborates: “This album really made itself; it commanded its own parameters. My first record took three years to make; the second took a year and a half. This one took six months, and during that time we were able to cut 30 tracks. Want One has a good balance of the maze I tend to wind people around. And it was a fun record to make. A lot of it was made just jamming, so it’s sort of laid back as well.”
Nonetheless, Wainwright’s legion of fans will recognize the careful execution of craft that made Rufus Wainwright (1998) and Poses (2001) indelible: the elegant orchestrations, some evoking at least two bygone centuries; the multi-tracked vocals, often stacked as high as a wedding cake; the thematic complexities inherent in all of the aforementioned four-letter words.
Of course, Wainwright’s work is unique among the artists of his generation – and, in fact, unlike anything currently orbiting the pop universe. But he has consistently managed to find eager allies, specialists equipped to help him realize his singular vision. His debut album featured contributions from esteemed composer/musicologist Van Dyke Parks; Poses bore the stamp of longtime Wainwright collaborator Pierre Marchand (also known for his work with Sarah McLachlan) and boasted arrangements by composer Damian le Gassick.
“I attempt to get the most out of every possible creative situation that I can,” Wainwright allows. “I tend to be a sponge.”
DreamWorks Records principal Lenny Waronker (who signed Wainwright) suggested that Marius deVries – highly respected for his work with Björk, Massive Attack, Madonna and David Bowie – produce the third album. This time around, orchestral arrangements came courtesy of deVries, Chris Elliott, Maxim Moston and Wainwright himself. Among the other artists lending their skills: guitarists Charlie Sexton and Gerry Leonard; guitarist/pianist Jimmy Zhivago; drummers Levon Helm, Matt Johnson and Sterling Campbell; bassists Jeff Hill and Bernard O’Neill; and backing vocalists Martha Wainwright (Rufus’ sister), Jenny Muldaur, Linda Thompson and Teddy Thompson. Kate McGarrigle, Wainwright’s mother, played the banjo and accordion.
“When I made Poses, I was thinking about it all the time and agonizing over it,” Wainwright reveals. “With the new record, I tried to make a point to not think about it and not agonize over it and just let it flow. But that is easier said than done. It seems you have to go through the beating-a-dead-horse thing before you can just let go, let it come out. A lot of that is faith, and I think you can’t really have faith until your beliefs have been completely destroyed and you are just feeling your way.”
Once they got started, the Want sessions moved along at a gratifying clip, but before he could even begin the project, Wainwright says, “I had to put my house in order.”
“On September 11, I was on tour and not really thinking about what was going on in my life or the rest of the world,” he confides. “Then there was a year of shock for everyone. After that, I went back to New York and moved into the first apartment I’ve ever really had. I was going to have a decadent, wine-and-roses summer. But it just didn’t go that way. I hit this major depression and eventually found myself having to sink or swim. I was approaching 30, and I felt I’d hit that age where I was either gonna go down one path and self-destruct or go down the other path and survive. I had to really look at my life and figure out what sustains me beyond music, beyond show business. So I just stopped the world and got off.”
After several intensive months spent wrestling his demons – teasing out the subtle distinctions between what he wants and what he needs – a newly clear-headed Wainwright was ready to jump back into the fray. On their most basic level, the Want songs are about the struggle to find one’s bearings.
Having connected with deVries, Wainwright and the Want creative team repaired to a friend’s apartment studio on the Lower East Side and began tracking – “and it just started tumbling out,” Wainwright remembers. “It was a build-it-and-they-will-come sort of thing. Then it turned out that Bearsville [Studio, in Woodstock, N.Y.] was about to shut down and they gave us a good rate, so we ended up there with musicians like Levon Helm and Charlie Sexton, to get more of a band feel. After that, we went off to London and finished the record very quickly.” He deadpans: “I like to say I made this record totally straight so that in a few years I can make my ‘drug record.’”
The album’s expansive reach and resolute grasp are manifest from its first moments. Of lead track “Oh What A World,” Wainwright says: “I included the theme from Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ because it’s circular and incessant, which I think suggests a recurring nightmare. But then the recurring nightmare becomes strangely comforting. With that song, I think I just needed to remind myself that life is still beautiful.”
In the linchpin “I Don’t Know What It Is,” Wainwright sketches the search for something elusive: “Get me heaven or hell, Calais or Dover…. But we’re chugging along…. And could be heading for Poland or limbo or Lower Manhattan.”
Many of the songs, including the gorgeous, bittersweet “Dinner At Eight,” serve as a sort of personal inventory. Some address life issues introspectively; others find the artist turning outward. “Vicious World” does both, reflecting Wainwright’s understanding that danger surely lies within as well as without.
“‘Vicious World’ has the big, Beach Boys harmonies come in,” Wainwright notes. “Some of the tracks on this album have 350 vocal parts, including the doublings and triplings. I give Marius credit – he just sat there for hours and hours, letting me plot it out. He really understood the importance of it. I can’t imagine how Brian Wilson did it before digital technology.”
Still, Wainwright has long been lauded for his ability to convey a startling range of emotion with just piano and voice. The “small” setting of “Pretty Things” amid a series of “big” songs makes a convincing case for the grandeur of intimacy. The spare approach offers another benefit as well. “You’ve got to be somewhat kind to the human ear,” Wainwright reasons.
But not for long. In the feverish “Go Or Go Ahead,” the invocation of Greek mythology hints at something ominous, and a howling chorus of voices echoes the song’s ravishing refrain.
Perhaps the most poignant moment on Want One is the coda to the buoyant, gospel-flavored “14th Street,” which Wainwright describes as a sort of triumphant return from the dark side. That’s where listeners can hear his mother, Kate McGarrigle, on banjo. “I’m so happy that happened,” he says. “There’s such an incredible musical dynamic among my mother, my father [Loudon Wainwright III] and me. My relationship with my mother is very intense, ferocious, even more so than with my father. There is this thing with mothers … Though they’re usually the ones who show you the most love and who are the most nurturing, they’re also the ones who have the greatest capacity to rip you apart.”
“Dinner At Eight” presents vivid imagery and an evocative string arrangement. It’s a challenge for an artist to be crystal-clear in his intent while remaining artful in his language, but Wainwright pulls it off here with photographic/poetic precision. “Drifting white snow,” the song’s central image, is so compelling, Wainwright says, because the life-altering experience described there occurred in precisely that setting. “Every time my mom hears it, she cries,” Wainwright informs, “because she can see that young child with his father leaving. It’s so heartbreaking, and it happens so often.”
“Dinner At Eight” is among the most emotionally naked songs Wainwright has ever written. “I’m afraid of my father,” he admits, “like all sons are. Our relationship is one of intense love, intense fear, intense respect and intense disrespect. A lot of the keys to my psyche and my well-being lie in that relationship. The issues that result from not having a father around, or the son rebelling against the father, are universal. Their impact is incalculable.”
For Wainwright, it seems, there is little separation between life and art, and that sense of making his private life public in his songs inevitably causes sharp pangs of vulnerability. “I saw [the documentary] ‘Don’t Look Back’ recently,” he says, “and I wish I could be like Dylan was then – just totally fucking everyone off. But I’m just not able to do that.”
To be sure, the unflinching self-examination of Want One leaves Wainwright open to all sorts of scrutiny. But so does his insistence on being a cultural maverick. Pop records like this one don’t grow on trees; indeed, very few artists in any idiom possess the vocal, compositional or psychological wherewithal to create a work of this quality.
“Yeah, yeah,” Wainwright says, dismissing any larger discussion of his gifts, “but sometimes I wish I could just make a dance record or something.”