Rufus Wainwright is releasing a new album, Unfollow The Rules, on Friday, so I wanted to look back at his very interesting and varied catalog and pick out some favorites. 

Rufus Wainwright deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Danny Boy

2. Millbrook

3. Foolish Love

4. Sally Ann

5. Grey Gardens

6. Poses

7. One Man Guy

8. Vibrate

9. Beautiful Child

10. The Art Teacher

11. Gay Messiah

12. Tulsa

13. Between My Legs

14. You Go To My Head

15. True Loves

16. Give Me What I Want And Give It To Me Now!

17. Barbara

18. Respectable Dive

19. Montauk

20. Take All My Loves (Sonnet 40)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Rufus Wainwright (1998)

Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Poses (2001)

In 1998, I went to see Sean Lennon at the 9:30 Club with Rufus Wainwright, two sons of famous musicians touring together in support of their respective debut albums. And I left the show more impressed with Wainwright's opening set, and have remained a fan ever since. When I was a lovelorn 16-year-old, that self-titled Rufus Wainwright album was one of my go-to emotional albums. At the 9:30 Club, he introduced "Sally Ann" by explaining that that was what they called the Salvation Army in Canada, so that was really my song after I went thrifting at the Salvation Army with a girl I liked. It wasn't lost on me that my unrequited romantic feelings weren't necessarily exactly the same as Wainwright's as a gay man, but the songs still resonated with me. Jon Brion and Van Dyke Parks did fantastic work on that album, I wish they'd continued to work on his later records, but I've read some things about how I guess Wainwright and Brion clashed a bit when collaborating. 

Back in the CD era, when I could only really afford to hear every album by my very favorite artists, I missed some of Wainwright's albums when they were released. Of the ones I heard for the first time when working on this playlist, All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu was a standout, I didn't know it was an entire voice-and-piano album, which was something I'd always wanted to hear Wainwright to do. I mean, the lush orchestrations that dominate his albums are great, but almost every singer-songwriter-pianist, I wish they did more music just sitting at a piano and singing.

I remember Rufus Wainwright speaking about his ambitions for really big time stardom early in his career. And I had a hard time really imagining what that would look like then as I do now, although I suppose the sky's the limit for a good piano ballad, of which he has many. But in retrospect he really has managed an impressive career, carving out a bigger niche than his father Loudon Wainwright III's also great catalog has, with his greater commercial success in Europe and Canada probably helping him remain a major label artist and decent concert draw in America. And of course a lot of these songs include appearances from the rest of the Wainwright/McGarrigle family, and "One Man Guy" is a great cover of a Loudon song from 1985's I'm Alright. 

Out Of The Game is my favorite album of his since Poses, I'm not a big fan of Mark Ronson but he was a good choice to give Wainwright a somewhat more contemporary sound. And there's a lot of great supporting performances on there, including Nels Cline trying on kind of uncharacteristic guitar tone on "Barbara." I wanted to include some of the stuff Wainwright has done outside of his singer-songwriter pop/rock albums, since he's really done some ambitious stuff. It didn't make sense to include the cast recording from his opera Prima Donna, which he doesn't perform on, but I did want some stuff from his album of musical adaptations of Shakespeare sonnets and his tribute to Judy Garland's 1961 classic Judy At Carnegie Hall. In the past I've regretted picking on musicians for forgetting lyrics in live reviews, because I've sung in public enough to know that we all drop the ball sometimes, but the part on "You Go To My Head" where Rufus sings "and I forgot the god-darn words" perfectly in the tune and meter of the song is so entertaining.