It’s 8.30am in LA’s Laurel Canyon, and in his crimson-walled, book-lined living room, Rufus Wainwright is fitting me into his manic week. He asks if he can turn off the camera to collapse as he relates what’s ahead: New York for the weekend, Stockholm to sing in a production of his 2009 opera Prima Donna, then “zipping it” over to Wales, where he once produced an album and had a night out he will only describe as “wild”. “Going to gay clubs in Cardiff was quite the journey,” he says, his tone twinkling.
To top it off, he’ll then play at Llais, a week-long celebration of storytelling and singing that forms part of the city’s wider Cardiff Music City Festival. It sounds knackering, I say. “I’m just living my showbiz life!” he responds, full of beans.
He certainly never seems to stop. This year, he’s also released the soundtrack to Dream Requiem – his 2024 classical work with Meryl Streep as its starry narrator, inspired by the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis – which premiered at Paris’s Auditorium de Radio France. And in November, he’ll release a collaboration with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill, a set of songs by the visionary early-20th-century German-American composer Kurt Weill. Weill, who alongside his collaborator Bertolt Brecht revolutionised highbrow art forms for the general public, has been a lifelong inspiration for Wainwright. “He achieved what I’d ultimately like to do as an artist,” he says. “Bringing opera together with popular music, classical singing with everyday life.”
Wainwright has the right genes to be a polymath. Born to the French-Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle and the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, he grew up absorbing multiple forms of music and lyrics. At 21, he sang on TV alongside his mum, his aunt Anna, Emmylou Harris and the Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan, and in that pivotal moment realised “what the human voice could do”. His early solo albums showcased his striking, agile vocals and ambitious arrangements (his eponymous 1998 debut album had strings by the Beach Boys producer Van Dyke Parks), and his rich and tender chamber-pop has expanded its reach outward ever since.
He first performed a concert of Weill’s work in May 2023, two months off his 50th birthday. Did that milestone drive his activity? “Yes,” he says, bluntly. “And I didn’t know this until I walked on stage, but the first performance was on Kurt Weill’s birthday, and not to be too morbid, but he died at 50. There was definitely a sort of cosmic occurrence going on!” Moreover, Wainwright Does Weill includes songs that have particularly resonated with Wainwright as he gets older, such as “It Never Was You”. “You can only understand that sense of longing and loss at a certain age,” he says.
Wainwright first fell in love with Weill in his teens, saying he “collapsed into the world” of the composer’s Berlin and American songs after he spotted an album in a record shop with a “grotesque but gorgeous, smiling but sneering, woman on the cover smoking a cigarette”. This was the Weill singer (and twice Weill’s wife) Lotte Lenya, a later Bond actress who led the first performance of Weill’s most famous work, his score for Brecht’s 1928 “play with music” The Threepenny Opera.
In 2020, Wainwright told music website The Quietus that Brecht and Weill’s piece, an adaptation of the English 18th-century ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera, was “the pinnacle, where all of the elements that [Weill] was influenced by joined together to create this other animal”. Today, he points to Nina Simone and composer Erik Satie as musicians who achieved something similar: “It’s not about doing whatever to please the masses, but creating this hybrid that is in itself deep, powerful and meaningful.” Weill was also famously political, and one track on the album, the 1928 song “Die Muschel von Margate [The Shell of Margate]”, is about a seaside village in the Balkans ruined by oil companies. “That song could have been written today,” points out Wainwright.
The singer is famously not quiet on politics. In October 2024, a clip of his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” being played at a Donald Trump campaign event went viral. “Witnessing Trump and his supporters commune with this music last night was the height of blasphemy,” he wrote in response, before being somewhat magnanimous. “The good in me hopes that perhaps in inhabiting and really listening to the lyrics of Cohen’s masterpiece, Donald Trump just might experience a hint of remorse over what he’s caused.” Then he plunged us back to earth. “I’m not holding my breath.”
Was he drawn to record Weill’s songs now because of their political content? “Oh God, yes. The parallels between then and now are just so disturbing, and also, I want to say revolting, but also diabolical. Everything’s upside down. We are struggling. We are in one of these dramatic world history moments, and this music resonates very, very loudly.”
As someone born in New York and living in LA with his husband, German art administrator Jörn Weisbrodt, Wainwright also lives in a country where Trump has dismantled protections for LGBT+ people in federal policy and brought in vocally anti-LGBT+ advisers to his cabinet. I wonder what it’s like to be an outspoken, gay Canadian-American today. “Look, I’m very fortunate,” he says. “I mean, we have a very nice apartment in Berlin, and the idea of escaping to Berlin is kind of wild, but that’s how it is, and I have Canadian citizenship and family up there. Also, let’s be honest, I’m a white male with some means, so I’m OK, although I do have exit strategies.”
All the same, he’s been occasionally confronted with direct opposition. During the first Trump administration in 2017, while playing a concert with the Minnesota Orchestra, he delivered an anti-Trump speech, which prompted principal trumpeter and Trump supporter Manny Laureano to storm off the stage, an incident he brings up today. “You know, in front of everybody,” he remembers. “So I’ve had reactions, but I think everybody’s in the same boat here. Everybody’s nervous about what they say and what they do.”
Wainwright has had tough times of a different nature when it comes to making art over recent years. In 2024, his first musical, Opening Night, starring Sheridan Smith and adapted by Ivo van Hove from John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, opened in the West End. After very mixed reviews, it closed after seven weeks. At the time, he railed against audience reactions: “Since Brexit, England has entered into a darker corridor where it is a little more narrow in its outlook.” He’s learnt an important lesson since then, he says. “Whatever you do, do not use the B-word if you’re not from the UK! It’s still such a hot topic. I certainly wished the show had been more successful, and I think if we had more time, that could have actually happened. But, look, it was my first time at the rodeo, and when you experience certain failures, that’s when you learn the most. Now I’m ready for battle, as they say.”
He also knows that theatres are generally in trouble. “In America, Broadway’s in trouble with money, orchestras are losing their budgets – all that’s happening. But at the same time, it is in these periods of stress and disturbance where art rises to the occasion, and so there’s so much inspiration right now. I do think there is something in art having to go through a bit of s*** to be stronger.”
He recorded the Weill album last summer, during the fallout from the play. He was “exhausted, jet-lagged, emotionally spent”, which he thinks was to the music’s benefit. “You don’t want to be too rested to sing a Kurt Weill song.” He also thought of his late friend Marianne Faithfull while making it, who had recorded her own version of The Threepenny Opera in 1998, and whom he visited not long before she died in January this year. He was accompanied by another uncompromising pop culture muse, Courtney Love. “We tried to ease her pain,” he says, his voice crackling with dark humour. “Marianne was so f***ing funny, so irreverent and dirty and very human, you know? We held onto that.”
Wainwright briefly recalls him and Faithfull sharing some “very enlightening and very darkening times” in the past, including before Wainwright got sober (his friend Elton John helped him get into rehab after Wainwright had gone temporarily blind from his crystal meth addiction). He’s 20 years clean now, and I wonder if his productivity ever since is partly fuelled by his improved state of health. “I think my creativity is acute, acute creativity,” he says, after pausing for a moment. “Part of that is to fend off the darker angels who are always hanging around the corner, but it’s great that it has a byproduct for me – all these songs, musicals and operas.”
We talk about his daughter, Viva (conceived via sperm donation to his friend Lorca Cohen, daughter of singer-songwriter Leonard), who’s now 14. She’s into Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and lots of 1980s pop such as Tears for Fears through TikTok, her dad says. “I really have to stop and think, wow, what a gift to be able to experience this, especially as a gay man who never thought he could have kids until his thirties,” he says. He’s also close with his younger singing sister, Martha, and tells me about meeting a thirtysomething recently in Scotland who asked him his name. “And they were, ‘Oh, Wainwright, like Martha?’, and I said, ‘Yes, we’re related,’ and they said, ‘Oh, are you her dad?’ Martha loved that!”
Rufus Wainwright plays at the Wales Millennium Centre as part of Llais at the Cardiff Music City Festival this Sunday 12 October. ‘Wainwright Does Weill’ is released by Rock and Roll Credit Card Inc on 21 November
