RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

Born: Montreal, Quebec, 22 July 1974

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Poses (2001)

Hit songs since 1990: "April Fools," "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk"

Being the progeny of famous songwriting parents is not easy, but singer and pianist Rufus Wainwright managed to carve his own niche in the pop music landscape toward the latter half of the 1990s. With a winsome quality, a flair for melodrama, and an affinity for the rhymes and musical styles of older artists, such as Cole Porter and other Broadway standard–writing greats, Wainwright is a throwback to another era. His songs are timeless, dramatic, and often find their protagonist, who is never male or female (Wainwright is openly gay), heartbroken and/or teetering on the edge of self-destruction.

Wainwright is the offspring of politically minded folk troubadour Loudon Wainwright III, and Canadian folksinger Kate McGarrigle. His father split up with McGarrigle (who writes and sings with her sister Anna) when Rufus was four. Rufus grew up with his mom in Montreal, and started playing piano at age six. By the time he was a preteen, he joined the family act, billed as the McGarrigle Sisters and Family, and toured Europe and the United States.

Wainwright attended a boarding school in upstate New York and then McGill University in Montreal for a while, but ultimately dropped out to start writing and pursuing a music career more seriously. His background helped him get his foot in the door—his mom passed along a tape of his to family friend, producer Pierre Marchand. It wound up in the hands of Lenny Waronker, who signed him to DreamWorks Records in 1996 and paired him with producer Jon Brion. The end result, after recording over fifty songs, is his self-titled debut. Rufus Wainwright (1998) is full of sweeping string arrangements and dashed hopes. The album's single, "April Fools," seems to typify Wainwright's cynical romanticism: "You will believe in love / and all that it's supposed to be / But just until the fish start to smell / And you're struck down by a hammer."

Shortly after his eponymous debut, the accolades came pouring in. Rolling Stone named him Best New Artist, and Rufus Wainwright earned Top 10 album of the year honors from the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times.

Wainwright toured extensively, appeared in magazines and a holiday Gap commercial, and released his sophomore effort, Poses, in 2001. An ambitious follow-up, Poses is cinematic in scope—each song's subject could have been a different character in a musical or film. Wainwright describes it as "a play with a cast of intriguing characters, and my voice is the star of the play." Writing in Newsweek, Lorraine Ali said, "Poses gracefully and painfully documents the world of the romantic megalomaniac . . . . If old-style Broadway musicals—think Cole Porter meets the biting irony of Oscar Wilde—ever made a resurgence in popular culture, Rufus Wainwright would be the perfect fit to pen the music." Her keen assessment succinctly summarizes Wainwright's abilities and proclivities as an unusual male singer of the late 1990s.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Rufus Wainwright (DreamWorks, 1998); Poses (DreamWorks, 2001).

carrie havranek