Rufus Wainwright's 6th studio release,
All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu, has been set for release on March 23 in Canada, April 5 in the UK and April 20 in the US. To the left is a sneak peak at the album cover, and you'll find the complete track list below. Stay tuned for more details and your first taste of the album soon.
All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu tracklisting:
1. Who Are You New York?
2. Sad With What I Have
3. Martha
4. Give Me What I Want and Give It To Me Now!
5. True Loves
6. Sonnet 43
7. Sonnet 20
8. Sonnet 10
9. The Dream
10. What Would I Ever Do With A Rose?
11. Les Feux d'artifice t'appellent
12. Zebulon
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Rufus Wainwright gives an exclusive live performance of Zebulon, taken from his new album 'All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu'.
I meet Rufus Wainwright for lunch in London a week after the funeral of his mother, the folk singer Kate McGarrigle, and he is still undone by the shock of grief – now tearful, now dissolving into his high camp laugh – raw-nerved in red clogs, skinny jeans and an old T-shirt, trying to keep himself in check with drawled ironies. Anyone who has followed the tortured and overlapping autobiographies of the Wainwright family in song, a confessional love story that has also involved the absent father (Loudon Wainwright III, who walked out on McGarrigle when Rufus was three) and the rival diva sister, Martha, will know that it has always been a drama with oedipal subtexts. Loudon, who originally welcomed his son into the world with the song "Rufus is a Tit Man", said recently in an interview that he pushed to move Rufus to a boarding school in his early teens "just to get him away from his mother". The four of them were reunited briefly at Kate's hospital bedside before she died, along with her singing sisters Anna and Jane, and closest friend Emmylou Harris.
The farewell became, as Rufus recalls, inevit ably, an impromptu performance: "We sang to her as she lay there… as we were having this jamboree, her breathing became more laboured and she made a moaning noise. One of the nurses said this could go on for four days and we had already exhausted the back catalogue. Then Kate breathed a little differently, it was like she was saying, 'Hold on, I'm going to end this show', and she died. I was looking right into her face, her eyes were open, and my aunt Jane was holding her hand. It was an amazing experience..."
Because he has had more than three years to contemplate the passing of his mother – she was first diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer in the summer of 2006 – Wainwright has already had the chance to unpack some of his grief in music, and few songwriters are better equipped to find those extremes – from mournful melody to show-must-go-on production number. He is in London to prepare, at Sadler's Wells, for what must feel now a little like a double-bill requiem involving a staging of his first opera, Prima Donna, and the beginning of a tour that will debut his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. In both cases the music was shadowed by his mother's illness, and counterpointed with the first contented long-term relationship of a promiscuous and mostly unhappy romantic life, with the theatre producer Jörn Weisbrodt.
Prima Donna was originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but when they passed up on it (apparently because they did not expect Wainwright to write it in French), it had its debut at the Manchester festival last summer. What gratifies Wainwright most about this fact was that it allowed his mother – his most singular and outspoken critic and fan – to see it before she died. Wainwright, dressed as Verdi (full beard, top hat and cane), accompanied her to the premiere, along with Jörn (who came as Puccini). "I didn't say so at the time, obviously," he says, "but while I was writing it my essential feeling was: 'I gotta get this done before my mother dies.'" The night she watched is among his favourite memories of her, one of the last times she seemed fully alive.
"What happened to her," he recalls, "was that she had been on several treatments that debilitated her – mostly her feet and her hands so she couldn't walk very well. But around that time she had received an injury – basically during a treatment a laser had burned her and caused a hole in her intestine. In order to heal that, she had to go off all her chemo. So she felt great for a while." They went for walks on the moors and had dinners out in Manchester, "but it was all bittersweet of course because as she was off the chemo the cancer came back full force. But she did get to see the opera, and she adored it. Which," he says, with a stagey guffaw, "was obviously a relief to both of us."
Prima Donna concerns an ageing opera star, haunted by lost love, who attempts to find her voice for one last performance. Wainwright came to the story having watched late interviews with Maria Callas, but he inevitably found all sorts of personal resonances in it. Having been used to wringing his own heart out on stage – he was fresh from his reincarnation of Judy Garland's legendary concert series at Carnegie Hall – Wainwright had the new experience of watching others express his music. The first time he heard the soprano Janis Kelly sing the part of Régine, in rehearsal, he had the sense that everything he had been feeling "just came back to slap me in the face. The thing was I didn't know I was so very sad, but there it was in the melody…"
Rufus Wainwright: 'I didn't know I was so very sad, but there it was in the melody.' Photograph: Kevin Westenberg
One of his responses to the stresses of staging the opera – he clashed spectacularly, he suggests, with the director and conductor of the Manchester staging – was to get back to his first love, writing at the piano. Songs for Lulu ("an eerie album, essentially my mourning while my mother was still alive") grows out of the haunting lyric for a song called "Zebulon" ("My mother's in the hospital, my sister's at the opera/ I'm in love again, but let's not talk about it…") and includes three Shakespeare sonnets, set memorably to music; but it is also, Wainwright says, something of a homage to his former party-loving and addicted self – Lulu – seen from the vantage of hard-won sobriety.
He feared once or twice that his settled relationship with Jörn might have a debilitating effect on his gift for tainted love songs, the yearning, nuanced ballads, one part Morrissey, one part Mahler, with which he made his name.
"I wondered if not being in these fatalistic disasters with boys, I would lose this dark lake of pain to drink from. But I needn't have worried too much," he says, with his wild laugh. "In many ways, Songs for Lulu is a reaffirmation of that persona. Highly romantic, highly unstable. I mean, what I have found is that once you give up on a life, it doesn't go away. You are always appeasing, or bargaining with, or neglecting that former self, the spirit who used to be behind the wheel, and would like to be still. I don't cross to that side of the street any more. But it is important for me as a healthy person to acknowledge that the demons are still around."
Ifirst interviewed Wainwright five years ago, near his home in Manhattan, and at that time he had not long recovered from a serious addiction to methamphetamine – crystal meth – that had left him blind at one point, and often, he recalled at the time, "with 20 naked people in my apartment and me in my bathrobe at the piano playing 'Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk'" (one of several hymns to addiction). His salvations, he said, had been Elton John (who told him to get to a clinic) and hard work (a dedication that he shows no signs of giving up on).
When I ask if there are elements of that former life that he still fears, he says, "Oh God, yes," quickly. "The demons are still up there on the wall, over my shoulder, with the fucking grin and the sawn-off shotgun, you know, waiting for me to slip up sometime. I mean, I sometimes wonder: don't they ever get tired?" It's not helpful, he says, to be hard-headed and say he will never go back there. "I don't want to put any restrictions on my life whatsoever. Maybe I'll go straight, grow tits, who knows really? What you do find, though, with addiction, is that it is the people with resources, who had enough love in their childhood, who get through. It's a testament to my mother in particular, and to my father and Martha and now my boyfriend, that I can continue to get beyond that."
Wainwright has recently become an uncle, to Martha's prematurely born son, Arcangelo, and the experience has left him further in awe of the mysteries of family. If Arcangelo had not arrived two months early – unexpectedly while Martha was in London away from home – his mother would not have seen her first grandson. "I have to watch out not to cry here," he says. "But it is hard to not think it was connected to my mother on some kind of level. She held him. On the one hand, that is beautiful, but it's very cruel too. It was like these two human beings had this will to connect when every possible thing was conspiring against them. It was an incredible joy for my mother. That will to love is very powerful. But it doesn't always win."
Martha Wainwright came to visit her mother in Montreal on the day she died but had to leave before the end, to get back to feed her son who was still in hospital. "She got on the plane," Rufus recalls, "and Arcangelo was a very, very quiet baby but apparently he screamed all that night, for five hours, and then he suddenly stopped, and the moment after he stopped was the moment I called Brad, Martha's husband, to say mum had passed away."
One of the changes that has already happened, Rufus suggests, is that "Martha has shifted, as only women know how to, straight into my mother's place. She has seamlessly become the matriarch in a way; like she's already insisting on picking me up from the airport, which my mother always did…" Rufus, as he has never been slow to acknowledge, has a mostly healthy dislike of being outshone by his sister, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why fatherhood now seems very much on his mind, too. "We're exploring all options, sort of, at the moment," he says, "and it's very top secret but it's certainly something I'm thinking of."
When I prompt him about these paternal feelings, he replies with an anecdote.
"One time I was hanging out with Leonard Cohen and his daughter," he says. "She was talking about this child she had known as a baby who she hadn't seen for a few years and how he was now grown up, and she said to her dad: 'You know, it's pretty amazing watching how the baby became a person.' Leonard looked at her and replied very drily, as only he could: 'You know, it's pretty much the only amazing thing there is.'" Wainwright laughs loudly. "It's clearly not a necessity for everyone, but I feel, you know, I shouldn't deny myself all that amazement…"
He has, over the years, certainly done more than his fair share of thinking about the responsibilities that paternity might properly involve. His extraordinary song "Dinner at Eight", in particular, which explores all of his resentment and love toward the father who left the family home, is the most visceral son-to-father lyric I've ever heard. He still sometimes cries when he plays it on stage. I wonder if his own experience of commitment, with Jörn, has given him any greater insight into his parents' separation all those years ago?
"Well, I think I can see it more as a great love story of that time," he says. "The late 70s. Two musicians – it was never going to be easy. About two months before my mother died, Loudon was doing a show in Montreal and she came down and he invited her on stage and afterwards they hung out together, and he said how fun it was to do music with her. When she really started to decline he called me and asked if he should come, and she agreed, though unfortunately when he did arrive she was pretty out of it. But he was there for her death. They didn't necessarily hug and say I always loved you or anything, but there was a kind of acknowledgment. Then the night before her funeral Loudon won a Grammy, his first, which of course he has been trying to win his entire life, and he dedicated it to Kate and thanked her for teaching him to play the banjo." Wainwright pauses. "So that was something."
Does he feel that he is growing more like his father as he ages?
"No," he says, "I'm nothing like either of them. It's like that if you are gay, anyway, but it's a generational thing too. My parents were from the only generation in history that had this sustained idyll in a way, the 50s and the 60s and the 70s; death always seemed a long way off to them. My generation, meanwhile, had Aids and Reagan and the Bushes…"
Neither of his parents coped at all well with his sexuality, he suggests, at least at first. "My mother, despite her liberal character, was one of the worst transgressors of the teenage coming-out story; she was really negative, tried to kick me out of the house at one point, when I was 14. She was scared about Aids, of course, but she also held some pretty deep-seated views, you know." During her illness, he believes that she tried hard to make amends for some of that. "She didn't want to talk about my sexuality. My father was equally as bad. But they liked Jörn and they saw he was in love with me and I was in love with him so they both worked hard at that, at welcoming him…"
When Wainwright was working with Shakespeare's sonnets, he says – he was asked to help create a theatrical cycle of them for the Berliner Ensemble – he found all sorts of echoes of these kinds of experiences in them. One of the sonnets he includes on his album is Sonnet 10, "For shame deny that thou bear'st love to any", and he didn't need to research the scholarly opinion on the "poet", the "dark lady" and the "beautiful boy" to understand that this was the first great coming-out poem in the English language. "I knew immediately, instinctively, that this was the point where the poet first admits his love for the boy. And it is sort of the beginning of the avalanche. I remembered that moment very well…"
All the time he is describing this personal history, you can see exactly why Wainwright was drawn at an early age to the opera rather than his parents' folky roots. It is hard not to imagine that one day he will make a Tristan and Isolde of Loudon and Kate. It is not impossible, he suggests, though "next time I would give myself five years and really go for the jugular. Prima Donna is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience. And I still think I am at the age where I should have a pop hit rather than a hit opera…"
He has plans first, he says, "while I just about have my looks", to have a go at a stadium tour, "just to see if I can cut it". And then, who knows? Songs are very much his therapy. Has he been writing, I wonder, since the funeral?
"Well," he says, grinning his practised grin, "a few have been creeping up on me. I had this weird experience. There is this church that I go to a lot in New York. I'm not religious but I love lighting candles and stuff. I find it useful. I'm a big Virgin Mary queen, I guess; anyway, this church has a statue in the corner with the Virgin and Joan of Arc and Saint Bernadette, kind of the original McGarrigle sisters, I always thought. After my mother died I was there, and I went to this corner but noticed there were no candles to light. I went to the rectory and this guy says, 'I'm afraid the church has run out of candles this morning.' And it's like, bang, OK, here comes the song! The church has run out of candles… the chords were all there and everything…" He laughs. "I really don't think the songs will ever stop coming."
Wainwright's opera, Prima Donna, runs at Sadler's Wells from 12-17 April. His sixth studio album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu is released on 5 April
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