By Bernard Zuel
Rufus Wainwright is taking stock.
After all, he's nearly 20 years into a career that maybe seemed destined from birth – that's what happens when your parents are two significant singers and songwriters on either side of the American/Canadian border – so it's timely. Plus, with so far, seven studio albums, two live albums, a greatest hits and a box set, an opera and a film appearance, it's a career which has possibly exceeded all expectations. Except maybe his.
Rufus Wainwright's favourite songs touch on his life as a "sad, longing, romantic lost boy with the gritty, city slicker, on the prowl boy".
With a tour of Australia sold as Rufus Wainwright's greatest hits (a semi-ironic claim given he has long pined for a few genuinely big hits), it's time to ask the man himself which songs really mark out the definitive moments of a catalogue that may yet come to be seen as one of the major collections of 21st-century songwriting.
FOOLISH LOVE
From Rufus Wainwright (1988)
"It was the first song off my first album and it is a piece I still sing often. In fact, I quite regularly end my shows with it, the final, final encore. I think for certain members of the audience it does cause an interesting chain reaction because for them it was the very first introduction to my voice and my songwriting. I think also what's nice about it is it encapsulates both elements of Rufus: the sad, longing, romantic lost boy with the gritty, city slicker, on the prowl [boy].
"What's interesting about that song is it really resides on a very fine line. It certainly borrows from jazz standards, has a lot of classical references, especially at the beginning, but it doesn't really inhabit any genre fully. Which is good I think because you can't put your finger on what's going on, and it set the tone for my style in general."
POSES and CIGARETTES AND CHOCOLATE MILK
Both from Poses (2001)
"Those are really offshoots of Foolish Love, in terms of examining the two streams that I have: one being the broken, morose soul and the other a severe party animal, goodtime girl.
"Starting first with Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk, another song I often sing at the end of the show because it has become emblematic. That was a real hit [he laughs] believe it or not. People stop me on the street, quoting lyrics from that, and that's important to me because as a performer I'm known for my work but also for performing other people's material, whether it's Hallelujah or Across the Universe, so I'm happy to have that little nugget of my own songwriting as a bona fide popular piece.
"Then you get to Poses and I don't want to call it my masterpiece - because of course I'm yet to write my masterpiece, as all artists feel - but I definitely feel that it is work that really came out glittering, proportional and lethal in its intent. It was one of those songs that kind of just arrived and I knew right away that it was a central part of my life being exposed. I think I hit a nugget of truth with that work."
I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS and DINNER AT EIGHT
Both Want One (2004)
"I Don't Know What It Is. That's relating to my personality and faced with the equation of being a young romantic and what that entails - which is you drink a lot, and lose yourself and at a certain point you have to snap out of it and become a man. There are very few times in my life where I have written a song and the music itself has actually saved my life. I don't think that happens very often but for me that one song was a plain message of having to get your house in order and deal with your shit.
"The other song that is coupled with that, of course, is Dinner At Eight, about my dad. I think once you develop a little bit more you start to look outwards and investigate this fantastic and horrifying family that I am surrounded with, these titanic figures. Be it my dad [Loudon Wainwright III] or my sister [Martha Wainwright] or my mother [Kate McGarrigle]. Around that time anyways we were trying to come to terms, all of us, with what it meant. Here we are, all these singer/songwriters, with all of our tremendous egos, but we all love each other and are keenly aware that we will serve each other better as a unit that as adversaries."
GOING TO A TOWN
From Release The Stars (2007)
"Obviously, in retrospect, it seems obvious one would sing protest songs against the Bush government and the war in Iraq, and really put your neck out there and make a statement. But the truth of the matter is, nobody really was and the backlash against you if you did was so profound. This was the Dixie Chicks-era of getting booed off stage. When I wrote Going to a Town it was right in the storm of that period and I think it was an important song for that time attacking the American government directly for how they were acting."
ZEBULON
From All Days Are Nights: Song For Lulu (2010)
"It's not necessarily dealing with it but it's inhabiting or orbiting the grief that I was experiencing with my mother's illness and subsequent death. It's a song that she both knew, I sang it for her and she really adored it, and that later on I clung to when I was in the storm of her passing. Zebulon, when it's done right and all the elements are in place, can be a very moving experience. It's is on one hand so dramatic but also stark at the same time."
MONTAUK
From Out of the Game (2012)
"It is about my daughter [Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen] and my husband [Jorn Weisbrodt] and I, our hopes and fears [about] being fathers and getting the attention and giving the attention needed by children. It's the next generation, the next step."
Rufus Wainwright plays Sydney's Taronga Zoo on March 7, and the State Theatre on March 9; and Melbourne's Palais Theatre on March 4.