A HIRSUTE CANADIAN-AMERICAN of 51 years, his beard giving him a look somewhere between a 19th century French composer and tidied up for a night in town outdoorsman, has just thrown a comment over his shoulder to an unseen child in need before turning to the camera. Life sorted, for now, he politely listens to a reminiscence. Mine.
The first time I saw him play in Australia, I tell Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright, it was solo on piano (and occasionally rudimentary guitar) downstairs in the Seymour Centre in Sydney, tables set up (they wished!) like a New York supper club. A week or so after he’d performed among a cast of dozens in a room of thousands at the Leonard Cohen tribute show, Came So Far For Beauty, at the Opera House, this wasn’t just intimate it was quietly thrilling as we realised we were seeing something and someone who wasn’t like the other kids in the class.
We were proved right, and Wainwright has been here in many formats, from small to Judy Garland cabaret, from ensemble work and family nights to a solo, dark-hued, wordless requiem since. Now he will return, two decades on almost to the day, back at the Big House for the Sydney leg, in upmarket rooms elsewhere in Australia, but again solo at the piano. Is this format his natural home or is this where his head is at, at the moment?
“This is my essence in the sense that I am from a family of troubadours,” he dryly chuckles. “Both my parents [folk luminaries Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright] were able to entertain a room alone with the piano or a guitar, and both [his songwriting sister, and occasional foil] Martha and I have continued that tradition. For a lot of people it’s the best way, it is their favourite way to see us because they really get into the crux of the matter.
“And there is of course financial perks [he chuckles again] as you make more money.”
The money joke is familiar, but it should be noted that it has sometimes seemed as if performing was a drain, if not a chore then not necessarily his first priority – he could be writing his opera after all. And then at other times it seemed to refresh him, reinvigorate him, reminding him why he started this music lark.
“I tend to flip-flop where I’ll be really entrenched in one discipline, whether it’s writing a musical or putting on an opera, and initially I’m always excited about that. But then by the end I’m pretty spent, because I put all of my energy into everything I do. I am able to long for the other side of the fence and eventually hop over because I own the whole property,” he laughs this time with a little wicked gleam. “I’m fortunate in that way that I can do both. It does make me do twice as much work but I am able to replenish my desires.”
One of those desires may be a little surprising given his sporadic and varied recording history which last year saw him release his first album that might fall within the family’s musical roots, Folkocracy.
“Right now one of my greatest desires is to go into the studio and make a pop record, because it’s been quite a few years. I’m keen to do that as soon as possible.”
A pop record? He will be, to upend the title of 2012’s Out Of The Game, from a previous deviation from the pop norm, back in the game.
“Yeah, call it back in the war,” he smirks.
In between the wars, back on stage and solo, what are the bits that work and the bits that don’t work for him?
“There’s no low points, unless you don’t have the audience on your side and that’s rarely happened to me,” he says. “Many years ago I did this crazy show call Songs For Lulu, which I did bring to Australia, and that was me alone but it was very artsy and the audience wasn’t allowed to applaud - I was in very heavy mourning for my mother.”
It wasn’t a grim show for him, despite the circumstances and the weight of Kate McGarrigle’s absence.
“It’s one of my favourite tours actually, because it was pretty intense and artistically very, very fulfilling. But that being said, there were a couple of times when I did it and it was just the wrong venue with the wrong crowd, and I had no recourse especially because I couldn’t speak during that section,” Wainwright says. “Luckily I’m very vocal and I am able to banter my way through pretty much any situation, something I’ve inherited from my dad. He’s always relished the possible conflict.”
Those Lulu shows were utterly enthralling but did ask a lot of modern audiences: to focus, to be still, to live without the fripperies of lighting and staging, to take it very very seriously.
“My main thing is I wanted to actually feel the vibe of the room without any indication of what that was, and also what the theatre was like, spiritually. With such a pure environment of people not making sound at all, and me walking out just doing the music, I really got to take the temperature of each location. I loved that.
“But don’t worry, this next tour is nothing like that and you can have a good time. Bring your picnic, have a drink, whatever.”
That noise you can hear is the sound of venue operator’s jaws hitting the floor as they contemplate audience picnics in their rooms. Who wouldn’t want to take a picnic to the Opera House or Melbourne Recital Centre?
“I only say that because there was a funny time when I was doing Songs For Lulu and it was a summer festival and all these people had come with picnic baskets and were expecting this joyful afternoon jaunt, and that’s not what they got. I was raining on their picnic.”
Silence from the stage was indeed a shock to the system: it is one of the things that people expect of the Wainwrights, the wit, the banter, the entertainment. And it’s good to get it, but it’s not something everybody can manage. Has he had to train himself to be that chatty, bantering performer?
“Well, yeah,” he drawls. “Both my parents did it, especially my dad – he still does it. So I had the education in that respect. But it took years to hone it down. I think one of the major lessons that I learned, and it did take a while, was to not speak so much. To have moments when certain songs would just flow to the other one and the banter was, more curated, shall we say. I had to make that balance a lot.”
A little more than 25 years into this career, it still seems like there is room to grow for him, creatively, which is not necessarily something you could say about many others. When he says he wants to make a pop album it does feel like there may be yet things to discover for both artist and fan.
“It’s a double edge sword in a lot of ways. On one hand, yes it’s so exciting to be able to explore all these different avenues and I am very inspired by these varied journeys through the arts. But the other side of it is I never really had a huge, blockbuster hit or number one record or anything, so therefore I was never really categorised and I never made the money that certain of my contemporaries did.
“That doesn’t really matter, I actually don’t really care about that at all,” he adds, perhaps not entirely convincingly. “But some of my eclectic nature is slightly due to failure. Though things are changing now, in terms of the classical world, because I’ve been at that for a while and this last piece I did, The Dream Requiem [which premiered in Paris mid-year] that has really been a nail that I could finally puncture into the classical world. It’s started to be really accepted as kind of a major work. That will be released, so you will hear it.”
Choral, orchestral and folk works aside, not to mention his marriage of 12 years so far with arts administrator Jorn Weisbrodt, there is another aspect of this older, maybe wiser, Rufus Wainwright to ponder: parenting. He has a daughter, Viva, with Lorca Cohen, daughter of another Canadian singer/songwriter, Leonard Cohen. Viva turned 13 this year.
Given the teenager and young adult he was, is he bracing for these next few years of being the parent of a teenager?
“We are really enjoying the teenage years so far,” he says. “She is 13 so we are at the beginning of the journey. I like to harken back to my mother, who much preferred teenagers to children: she rather despised small children and it was only once they were really curious and interested and able to have real conversations, that her love was kindled. So I’m going with that philosophy at the moment, though I did love Viva when she was little as well.”
Is a cliché but not necessarily untrue because of that, that part of being a teenager is if not setting yourself against parents and at least separating yourself from them with your tastes and actions and ideals, even if you share them at your core. As he might recall of his teenage years, when he would sneak out of his mother’s home and head off to some rather hedonistic clubs. How does he expect Viva to rebel against him? Or how would he like her to rebel?
“Well, I don’t,” he confesses. “I think what I’m realising a lot, in general, and this is for better and for worse, is that I was a very unusual child. I was pretty – how can I say this? – driven and focused on my passion and my love of music and art. And it started incredibly early. That is very unusual; it’s not the norm. So for me to expect that from other kids is not really fair. I still want to have expectations, I still want to be encouraging, I still want to nurture things and so forth, but for me to try and repeat what occurred in my life, it would be a real mistake.
“I’m going to stop there because I don’t want to say anything too foolish,” he finishes with a laugh, knowing very well that any or all of this could be quoted back to him in a few years.
One final aspect of being a performer with a quarter-century career already is that people do start thinking of him in a retrospective sense, and not just journalists who may have been asking him how and why he does what he does for most of that time. Possibly the most obvious manifestation of it is the autobiography, something his sister, Martha, did in the past year, and did rather well.
Did reading her book encourage or discourage him from doing the same?
“I will say with Martha’s book that she really raised the bar really high. I was so struck by her wonderful writing, her economy of expression,” says Wainwright. “So I’m quite daunted after reading Martha’s book. I should write one at some point because I’ve got a lot of interesting stories but at the moment I just want to go in and make another pop record. Become a teenager again.
“That’s how I’m going to relate to my teenager: I’m going to become one.”
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Rufus Wainwright plays
Fremantle Arts Centre, January 4
Sydney Opera House (as part of the Sydney Festival), January 8
Melbourne Recital Hall, January 10
Odeon Theatre, Hobart, January 12
The Tivoli, Brisbane, January 14
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