When searching for the essence of the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, it's hard to go past the sharp eye of his own mother Kate McGarrigle.
He is sauvage, she once said, using the French word for wild. McGarrigle, a Canadian folk singer, was referring to the excessive behaviour of her son's youth but equally it might also accurately tap the artist within: untamed, very instinctive, fuelled by emotion.
"The main difference between now and then, is then I was possessed with a kind of hunger for all things showbiz, musical and stage related," Wainwright says. "I think the way my mother looked at it, and this helped her when I went into the darker realms, where I started with drugs and stuff, [was that] deep down I had this light.
"The spirit was essentially about survival, and about progression, and it wasn't this nihilistic self-defeating kind of comet, or shooting star that was going to be extinguished at some point, it was about sticking around, and going all the way," he says. "It was a good sauvagerie," he adds, with a disarming smile.
Rufus Wainwright: "I was so ambitious, so desiring of success."Credit: GREG GORMAN
Wainwright's upcoming Australian tour marks (roughly) the 20th anniversary of his debut album, 1998's self-titled Rufus Wainwright. It was followed in 2001, by his second album Poses. Both works are considered among Wainwright's most significant.
"It's one of those paradoxes where when I look back and of course it's yesterday, it seems like yesterday, but that's coupled and tripled and quadrupled with so many memories of just waiting for something to happen, or for feeling impatient and unfulfilled," Wainwright says of his younger self.
"Certainly being here in LA, and especially now that I'm finishing this album that will be released in about a year, working with some of the same people who worked on the first record, there's a kind of a bookend sensibility which is arising, where it's like a circle."
And 45, he says, easing into the sofa in the rustic Los Angeles canyon home he shares with his arts administrator husband Jörn Weisbrodt, doesn't feel like he thought it might back when he was 25.
Rufus Wainwright and band on stage at the Paramount Theatre, Charlottesville.
"I remember thinking that 30 was, not necessarily ancient but, definitely the first signs of decay, now for me 30 is a baby," Wainwright says, laughing. "I was so ambitious, so desirous of success, I felt this nagging need to work my ass off on all fronts to make it in Hollywood."
Wainwright was born in Rhinebeck, New York, the son ofMcGarrigle and fellow musician Loudon Wainwright III. His parents divorced when he was three and he lived with his mother, who performed with her sister Anna, and his own sister Martha in Montreal for most of his youth. As a boy he toured with the family group, The McGarrigle Sisters and Family.
Rufus Wainwright, left, and his husband Jorn Weisbrodt earlier this month in West Hollywood.Credit: CHRIS PIZZELLO
"In retrospect, it was very unusual," Wainwright says. "My mother and father lived in New York for a long time, my mother made albums in Los Angeles, I almost drowned when I was a child at the Chateau Marmont and I was saved by [Broadway legend] Betty Buckley, of all people.
"I think that if they had stayed in New York or LA I would have maybe had more to relate to with other [famous]progeny, people I know now like Sean Lennon, or Adam Cohen, all these people who came from that. In Montreal we were wholly unique. Definitely we were the funky family on the block."
The many poses of Rufus Wainwright.Credit: GREG GORMAN
It's the wildest ride I've ever been on and completely earth shattering on every front.
Rufus Wainwright
Many come to Hollywood – either the city, or the metaphor it represents – with a narcissistic dream: to be on the cover of the album, or the movie poster. Wainwright's art was more instinctual in nature. He was ambitious, no question, but perhaps as ambitious for the art as he was for the glory.
"What's interesting is that I was haunted by that same mad desire, to be on the cover of every magazine, and just play that game," he says. "I think that's necessary if you're really gonna step into the ring in this business. So many people do, and so many people have that kind of sickness.
Sister and singer Martha Wainwright: theirs was an unusual upbringing.
"Luckily, with both my parents, they really instilled me with a knowledge of what's great and what isn't," he says. "That I really have to credit my parents with, and it's something that I think is very much lacking for most young artists today, [for whom] it is mostly about just making money or being famous.
"Somehow I was spared this seduction of wealth and power and success on the surface level. I mean I still wanted it like everybody else, but when it came down to the actual product it really was about just the work."
Kate McGarrigle performed with her children Rufus and Martha and her sister Anna at the Enmore Theatre in 2005.Credit: Domino Postiglione
Young adulthood wasn't so much tough as it was complicated. His relationship with his father was fractured. He was addicted to crystal methamphetamine for several years. The demon within, the sauvagerie, for a moment, seemed like it was winning the fight.
He and his father have, by all accounts, resolved their issues though both refrain from discussing the other in interviews. Speaking to The New York Times in 2003 about his stint in rehab, Wainwright did offer this reflection: For every man in group therapy there, the minute they would get to their father, the tears came."
Loudon Wainwright III: father and son have apparently resolved their issues.Credit: mgraham@theherald.com.au
In the aftermath of his recovery, Wainwright soared out of the darkness. A third, fourth and fifth studio album came in 2003, 2004 and 2007. And then a sold-out season at Carnegie Hall performing the Judy Garland concert album which had been recorded there in 1961.
In preparing for his upcoming Australian tour, Wainwright says, he had to stare deeply into his own past. "And for better or worse I was painfully aware that that little boy is still there, that little lost kid in Manhattan, and in Montreal," he says.
"When I did the show in LA it was this kind of triumphant return, then I had the New York show and I was shocked at how nervous I became and how kind of all of the sudden the ghosts of that city were knocking on my dressing room door.
"I was once again in that spot that I'd sort of forgotten about, which was not a happy place as a very young songwriter and artist. But I did a hell of a show."
In 2009 Wainwright, his mother Kate and sister Martha performed together on stage for the last time. Kate died in January 2010 and Wainwright's enduring memory of his mother is waking to the sound of her playing piano, most often the Goldberg Variations by Bach.
"It's interesting because I've had several encounters with that suite of pieces, and calling it a suite of pieces is really not appropriate, it's a great masterpiece for the keyboard," Wainwright says of his mother's favoured composition.
Later, at boarding school, he studied with a teacher who lived in a house that belonged to the legendary harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who had famously recorded the pieces. Her enduring lesson? "You can play Bach how you want to play Bach, she said, but I will play Bach the way Bach wants it to be played," Wainwright recalls.
In 2012 Wainwright married Weisbrodt. And with childhood friend Lorca Cohen, the daughter of Leonard Cohen, and "deputy dad" Jörn, became parents of a daughter Viva. "The little angel is evidently healthy, presumably happy, and certainly very very beautiful," the birth notice said.
"It's the wildest ride I've ever been on and completely earth-shattering on every front," Wainwright says of fatherhood. "I've never been happier and I've never been more upset, I've never felt younger, I've never felt older. I highly recommend it, if one wants to kind of reach new heights and new lows," he says. "It's quite wonderful."
Significantly, it has given the older Rufus a context with which to frame his relationship with his own father.
"With both my dad and my mum, and certainly the age that we live in now, and this is alluding back to the sort of hazy days of the '70s in Montreal, a real concerted effort to break some of the patterns that I'm up against is needed," Wainwright says.
"This is nothing against my parents, my parents did the best that they could. I think they improved as they got older. I think that I've forgiven them both for some pretty lousy stuff, and they are who they are, and that's what I'm learning to accept them for.
"In terms of my relationship with Viva it's shocking how many times I run into this sort of pattern that I can so easily slip into and cut out and just remake the sweater, but I have to physically shift gears," he says. "Thankfully now there are resources and there's a lot of help, and there's a lot more knowledge in terms of bringing up kids.
But can she sing? Wainwright smiles. "She has a beautiful voice, yes," he says. "I don't like to get too [personal] but I will say she has sung, and she can hit the notes."
Coming to Australia is an unexpectedly complex journey for Wainwright. The show, he says, will dazzle. "We splurged and there's a beautiful set, nothing lavish but I think it really adds a lot," he says.
"It's a bit smoke and mirrors, how we do it, but then I won't give too much of it away, but it's framed in this way that refers to elements of those first two records."
And his voice, he says, is better than ever. For that he credits the deep dive he did into Garland's songbook, which changed how he breathed and permanently altered his voice. "That was a big thing," he says. Wainwright also credits the fact that most opera-trained voices flower in their 40s "and that is sort of what has happened for me, thankfully," he says.
But the stage, for the 45-year-old singer, remains a complex and sometimes lonely space.
"A few years ago, around the time my mum died, I did a show, just me alone at the piano and I purposely requested that there be no applause," he says. "It was just me, alone at the piano, no applause and really processing my mother's death.
"I just felt I could kind of shut my eyes and I could be anywhere in my imagination but [for the first time] I really did feel the difference of where I was," he says. "I had never before believed that there was a kind of geographical element that was so important."
Australia, he notes, was the last stop on the tour he undertook in the wake of his mother's death, "so I think by the time I got to Australia and New Zealand, I realised I'd been looking for her all over the world, and I'm here now and I didn't find her," he says.
"It's interesting because Leonard Cohen actually told me right after my mother died, he said, 'Rufus, just so you know my mother comes to me more now than she ever did'," he says. "And I have no fear that Kate will return to me.
"But there was definitely a point where I had to kind of bury the rattle, and become a man in a lot of ways, mostly for my daughter, but also for my marriage, and for my own sustenance. So much in life is about letting go, eventually. That's just the way it is."
And if life is indeed about letting go, then perhaps for the Wainwrights it is also about hanging on. At the heart of the family tree remains one indestructible trunk: a mountain retreat in the small Canadian postcard town of Saint-Sauveur.
"It's not glamorous or anything, but it has a lot of character," Wainwright says of the house, built by hand in the 1930s by his grandfather. "[It is] this kind of strange antique remnant of an earlier age. I feels symbolic of a lot of both mine and Martha's sensibilities, we are out of this time in a lot of ways.
"We all have children now and Saint-Sauveur is that it's the one place where I think we can all gather and shed the trappings of each other's lives, and just become a family again. I have to sleep on a bunk bed, and someone has to sleep by the fire, so it's sort of it's a great way to bring us down," Wainwright says. "It's a nice way to get off the pedestal."
Rufus Wainwright: All The Poses tour will play in Melbourne on February 23 and 25, Sydney on February 26 and Canberra on February 28.