Rufus Wainwright: In search of lost timelessness
For American-Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, his ninth album Unfollow The Rules is another attempt at achieving artistic immortality.
It is late March when Review connects with Rufus Wainwright, and there are no prizes for guessing where he is: at home, just like 40 million or so of his fellow Californian residents and many more millions of people across the world, opting to shelter in place in an attempt to avoid catching or spreading coronavirus.
A week earlier, he had revived a video concept that he had first attempted in June last year. Named Robe Recitals, the series of short clips chronicles how the singer-songwriter spends each morning: he gets up, makes coffee and sits down at his piano to practise new ideas and rehearse old arrangements.
That first run was a short-lived curiosity that offered glimpses into the daily routines of a man who has spent much of his adult life in the public eye. In lockdown, however, the idea took on a fresh currency that offered mutual benefits to performer and audience. The extended stint at home allowed Wainwright to practise in a deeply engaged way that often eludes touring musicians: as anyone who spends a lot of time on the road can attest, you have your chops enough to get by playing your existing repertoire, but not to expand your knowledge too much because of strictures of time and travel.
“For me as a pianist, it’s been an amazing opportunity to practise,” Wainwright says. “In the classical world, when you’re a pianist, you practise for 10 hours a day; if you’re going to play those Rachmaninoff concertos, it takes that much time to really focus on that. Now, I’m never going to get to that level, obviously — but certainly as an instrumentalist, having those extra few hours to really dig into the music and to really challenge yourself technically is a real gift. Especially in the pop world, after you’ve been around for a while, it does get a little processed; ‘I’ll rehearse in this period, then I’ll do promo, then I’ll go on the road and have a piano backstage so I can warm up for my show’ — you do lose that vital relationship with your instrument.”
In the renewed Robe Recitals — which he soon dubbed “quarantunes” — the 46-year-old American-Canadian offered himself up to his fans in a way that ordinarily is impractical, if not impossible. Yet by knowing that he and his family weren’t going to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future, Wainwright was one of the first popular musicians to see the COVID-19 lockdown period as a way to build a regular and meaningful connection with his global audience. He set himself the goal of publishing a performance of one song each day from his substantial catalogue, comprising nine albums since 1998.
“It’s something to do in the sense that I, like everyone else, has had to occupy themselves within their home, so I’m very fortunate to be able to do them,” he says of the video series. “And then for it to have an impact and for it to bring joy to people’s lives, and to mine as well, it’s really kind of a no-brainer in a lot of ways.
“I wanted to do my part in this battle, and be a force for good, and I am getting very, very grateful responses from people who it’s helping out. I’m not saving anybody’s life, of course, but I think we all have to give where we can.”
Across two months of quarantunes reliably filmed by his German husband, Jorn Weisbrodt, Wainwright certainly gave a lot of himself: all up, he published more than eight hours of music that attracted millions of views on social media. He sang and played 60 of his songs on piano and guitar before running out of material that he could perform solo, prompting him to collaborate later in a studio with pianist Jacob Mann.
The series is ongoing, although not at the same daily rate at which he set out. It’s a remarkable feat of musicianship and generosity and, as he later tells Review via email, its benefits have been keenly felt.
“It gave me a certain sense of structure which is important during these times, and it also made me practice the piano every day,” Wainwright writes in late June. “To me that was the best thing about the lockdown: I was really forced to play the piano a lot and had a lot of time for it. It is where new ideas come, and where I really feel at home artistically. It was very gratifying to be able to brighten up the day of people in these dark times. A lot of songs also took on completely new meanings: [2003 release] Dinner at Eight was written in defiance of my dad but I always thought it is really a love letter to him — but now it also is about family and how important it is to be able to come together at the dinner table, the nucleus of really who we are as people.”
Many things have changed since that phone call in late March, which now feels like a transmission from a much simpler and more innocent time, before the US and Australia came to truly reckon with coronavirus, with vastly different public health outcomes. One of those changes was the release date of Unfollow the Rules, Wainwright’s ninth album and the reason he connected with Review in late March; originally set for release in April, it was pushed back three months.
Its title, meanwhile, now could be interpreted as a call to action for those frustrated by the tedium of lockdown, yet the phrase first emerged from the mouth of Wainwright and Weisbrodt’s eight-year-old daughter, Viva. “She’s a very precocious child — an incredibly intelligent, charming, beautiful girl, and we love her to bits,” Wainwright says. “One day, she walked into the living room and exclaimed that she would love to ‘unfollow the rules’ sometimes — and then walked out, basically. I knew that I had a song on my hands. That’s the way it is with songwriting: you don’t write the whole song right away, but there’s a kind of frequency that goes off when you know instantly that there’s something there.”
The soaring and dynamic title track runs to nearly seven minutes, making it one of the longest in Wainwright’s catalogue, and the songwriter took his daughter’s prompt in a different direction to that which she had referred, which he thinks was related to something she had heard about the notion of deciding to stop following someone on social media. To him, “unfollow” means to re-evaluate and come to terms with why certain rules exist in the first place — then decide how to respond to them.
Wainwright has spent recent years toiling in the classical world by writing two operas, Prima Donna and Hadrian, with mixed results.
“I definitely made a mark there,” he says. “I didn’t by any means conquer the form, but they are doing productions of my work now in Europe, so there’s a future and there’s talk of other commissions. It was a good thing to do, but I did feel at certain dark times where I was very much under attack by that establishment.”
His escape at such times was to the place where his musical roots began: pop songwriting, the form with which he emerged with his self-titled debut in 1998 and the form he returns to on album No 9. “I would console myself with these little compositions that I could sing and play, and just feel better about the world,” he says. “A lot of the material was written in that state, and I think you can hear it in the work.”
Unusually, Wainwright himself has been written about since he was born. This is how it goes with a family of singer-songwriters — including his father Loudon, his mother Kate McGarrigle and his sisters Martha and Lucy — as each constantly pilfers the family tree for fruitful material to be used in their respective art practices.
This is the milieu in which he was reared, and it’s a notion to which he returns on Unfollow the Rules, where he has written songs for his husband (Peaceful Afternoon) and their daughter (My Little You). He knows better than most that writing about those closest to him can be a double-edged sword.
Actually, leave it to Wainwright to summon a sharper metaphor: “Let’s just say they’re very dangerous ingredients that can either give you the best meal of your life or kill you, so you’ve got to be careful,” he says with a laugh.
“There’s almost a kind of blood-soaked contract that you have to sign, that on one hand brings a lot of pain, sadness and darkness, because you’re translating your feelings into some kind of product — but on the other hand it can be equally as brilliant, wonderful, loving and compassionate.”
As for the thought of writing a song to someone he loves but keeping it private? Wainwright cannot bear it, and seems a little offended at the suggestion, as if it would be the height of artistic arrogance to hold back in such a way.
“If it’s a good song, you’ve got to get it out there; every member of my family would walk over each others’ dead bodies for that good song, I’ll guarantee you that,” he says with another laugh. “But that being said, we all love each other very much, and also respect each other very much as artists and as people, thankfully.”
During the lockdown period, the trio were holding regular family movie nights that included viewings of old musicals such as There’s No Business Like Show Business, released in 1954 and featuring songs written by Irving Berlin.
“I’ve seen it a couple of times, but this time especially, I’m constantly reminded that a great song is just eternal,” he says. “It’s something that never dulls in its ability to have an effect or bring about a sensation, when they’re so masterfully written — and Irving Berlin certainly knew how to do that.”
As someone who has been working in music for more than two decades, Wainwright has had a longer and more prosperous career than most, yet he’s continually raising his eyes further down the road beyond even his grave, towards the sort of artistic immortality earned and inhabited by few songwriters. The goal is to somehow come close to someone such as Berlin, whose compositions have stood the test of time and outlived their creator. Most days he doubts whether he’ll ever get there, but occasionally there’s a glimmer of possibility, and those glimpses are reason enough to persist.
Unfollow the Rules is released on Friday, July 10, via BMG.