‘Sing as if you’re listening’: Life according to Rufus
Rufus Wainwright’s upcoming tour Down Under is something uplifting for the world-renowned singer-songwriter to look forward to – and a much-needed break from Trump’s America.
When Rufus Wainwright returns to Australia to tour in January, the American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer says he will enjoy the break from Donald Trump’s America.
Speaking only a few days after Trump was re-elected to a second presidential term, Wainwright is still filled with fiery anger that his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was played at a Trump rally. So he’s looking forward to “getting some time away from Trump 2.0 and hopefully returning home with a better perspective on everything that’s happened”.
Few contemporary artists understand the art of musical reinterpretation quite like Wainwright. Born into folk music royalty, his parents are singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle, his aunts folkies Anna McGarrigle and Sloan Wainwright, his sister singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright and his half-sister musician Lucy Wainwright Roche.
He was raised in Canada, singing along with folk songs before he could properly speak, and he has released 11 studio albums. Unlike his family, however, Wainwright made his name composing lush, complicated, baroque pop music. He has crafted half a dozen albums of original songs as well as penning two critically acclaimed operas and, most recently, a musical.
His most recent album, 2023’s Folkocracy, is an unpredictable collection of reimagined folk classics, with contributions from some of the most compelling voices in pop music. Among the album’s 15 tracks are a sombre murder ballad sung with Brandi Carlile, a rootsy take on Neil Young’s Harvest, a slow-burning rendition of Cotton Eye Joe with Chaka Khan, plus appearances from David Byrne, John Legend and ANHONI.
“I think you have to treat it like a life-or-death situation when you’re covering somebody else’s music,” Wainwright says. “It has to have that same level of intensity there, both for you as a performer and also for the listener. I recently read the greatest line about music that I’ve ever heard. I was flipping through a book of poetry from Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and writer from about 100 years ago.
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“There’s this poem where he says, ‘Sing as if you’re listening’. That was so enlightening to me because that’s my absolute belief – that the heart and soul of being a great interpreter is to sing a song and listen to it at the same time. To really inhabit it in this holistic way where all of your senses are in service to the music.”
Wainwright’s profoundly singular voice – richly textured, leisurely but tightly controlled, imbued with undeniably theatrical vibrato – is the kind that could sing the phone book compellingly. But it takes more than a practiced singer to discover new meaning within a pre-existing piece of art, or to add emotional dimensionality to a beloved original.
He has long struck a successful balance between songwriter and performer. Since releasing his self-titled debut in 1998, Wainwright has released six albums of original material, two opera recordings and recorded a live Judy Garland tribute album at New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall, featuring a 36-piece orchestra.
In many ways, Folkocracy constituted both a homecoming and a tremendous challenge for him, as a performer and as an artist. It is, he says, the album that people “always expected” him to make but one that it took turning 50 to feel comfortable finally creating.
“It was kind of my birthday present to myself,” he says. “If I’m completely honest, I wanted to win a Grammy, and I did end up being nominated, but in the end I lost out to Joni Mitchell and, really, who can be angry about that? But this is music I grew up with, (was) surrounded by and, I guess, I really wanted to explore it very much on my own terms and in my own unique way.
“Going through the material, choosing what to record, ended up being actually really rather emotional because, you know, I was turning 50 at the time, I was still mourning the death of my mum, and my daughter is almost a teenager. So I thought that it would be kind of nice to show her some of these songs, to introduce her to them and put them down for posterity.”
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When Covid hit, Wainwright was forced to stay put at home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his husband, Jorn Weisbrodt, and their 12-year-old daughter, Viva, after years of constantly travelling the globe. This turned out to be a “surprisingly liberating force”, he says, allowing him to be present for his family, practice his piano skills and to spend time rediscovering a love of drawing and illustration.
Folkocracy arrived at a time of renewed interest in folk music. Despite growing fears of AI-generated music, many of the year’s biggest musical releases – Lana Del Rey, boygenius, Feist – pay homage to the gentle beauty of folk’s halcyon era and contain references to the vivid storytelling and intricate harmonies pioneered by recently passed legends such as Gordon Lightfoot or David Crosby.
“I think there’s a very well-founded fear that robots are going to control everything, but there also, thankfully, seems to be this very strong and persistent desire for humanity and imperfection and everybody communing in real time, singing songs that have passed the test of time,” Wainwright notes.
Among the oldest songs on Folkocracy are Shenandoah, a traditional folk ballad believed to have originated among fur traders; Arthur McBride, an almost eight-minute anti-war song, likely of Irish origin; and Nacht und Traume, a 19th-century composition by the German composer Franz Schubert. Wainwright approaches all three with gentle intensity and musical restraint, luxuriating in ancient melodies from around the globe.
For the cover of Young’s Harvest, Wainwright handed the keys to acclaimed multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Andrew Bird. “I’ve performed the song for years,” he says. “But I tend to do it in a more lugubrious fashion – a lot slower, a lot more seductive. But Andrew’s direction made it a bit more upbeat, a bit more masculine.”
But perhaps the finest moments on Folkocracy occur when Wainwright creates space for his high-profile collaborators to shine. On Cotton Eye Joe, Wainwright and Chaka Khan reimagine the traditional country folk song as a sultry duet, inspired by an obscure live performance by Nina Simone in the 1950s.
“I heard it 30 years ago and it totally changed my life,” he says. “To be in the same room as Chaka was such a thrill, let alone to sing with her. She was doing exactly what she wanted and it wasn’t at all what I had planned. There was literally a second of dread where we were like, ‘Oh, my God. This is going to collapse and just not work’. But, by the end, it was so brilliant.”
Another highlight is Going to a Town, a stunning recording of Wainwright’s song from his 2007 album, Release the Stars. Featuring stirring back-up vocals from English-American singer ANHONI – “one of the most underappreciated artists of our generation” – the melancholic recording finds heightened significance at a time of increasingly harmful anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric and legislation.
“I very selfishly wanted one of my own songs on the record,” he says. “The song ties very much into the aspects of folk music that I love and admire so much, which is the political element – a willingness to speak truth to power and to engage in civil society, or be uncivil in civil society.
“With the re-election of Trump, a lot of us are fearful for our safety and our rights, so there’s a very dark undercurrent when I sing, Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved? I’m so tired of America.
“I do hope that Trump being re-elected will force us all together, because I think we’re really going to have to fight just for our right to exist. I think there could be something quite beautiful in that, but I do also feel a really deeply entrenched sense of fear and foreboding.”
Rufus Wainwright plays The Tivoli, Fortitude Valley, January 14; frontiertouring.com/rufuswainwright