From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V9 #289 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Monday, October 13 2003 Volume 09 : Number 289 Today's Subjects: ----------------- rufus wainwright article. ["heidi maier" ] Thought I had seen it all ... [Yngve Hauge ] AW: Thought I had seen it all ... [Stefan Adler Subject: rufus wainwright article. [from the observer online]: Nowt as queer as folk Raffish of look and forthright of speech, singer Rufus Wainwright tells Kitty Empire about the legacy of his famous parents, a past penchant for crystal meth and his self-inflicted 'gay hell' Sunday October 12, 2003 The Observer The Sunburst Cafe on Third Avenue and 18th Street near New York's Gramercy Park is a busy neighbourhood pit stop. Behind the counter, the Russian-accented staff have gone native, serving up skinny lattes and deli panini. It's not far from where songwriter and aesthete Rufus Wainwright has just bought his first flat. Although Rufus - the son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle - was brought up in Canada, he is a very New York sort of creature. Today, for instance, his outfit suggests a lower Manhattan rock bohemian. The plush sheepskin jacket keeps out the first bitingly cold day of autumn. His torn jeans would not look out of place on one of The Strokes. The trendy patchwork boots lend him a raffish, elfin air. The city inhabits his songs, too. 'Poses' - from Wainwright's second album of the same name, written on a piano at the Chelsea Hotel - depicted him 'drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue'; 'Oh What a World' - the first song on his latest record - muses: 'Still I think I'm doing fine/Wouldn't it be a lovely headline?/ "Life is beautiful"/On the New York Times.' 'One of the reasons I live here is that I really feel like New York needs me right now,' he says, warming his hands on the small vat of caffe latte he's ordered. 'New York is not the centre for American culture and art that it once was because of the forces of conservatism. Giuliani, capitalism - and then there was 9/11. I really believe that if I leave, it will suffer! Maybe that's why I love it here, because I feel wanted.' It's a typical Wainwright outburst - full of playful self-regard, erudition, humour and drama. Rather like his music, in fact. He's a compelling songwriter, witty and honest, inspired by his own life. His three albums to date have combined orchestral arrangements and ragtime, topped off with his scuffed-molasses vocals. Despite a devoted fanbase, he has yet to sell records in the quantities his talent (and ego) demand. Wainwright's fame, though, has grown steadily with each album. Being the child of folk royalty, he's certainly very well connected. Beach Boy associate Van Dyke Parks not only scored the strings on Wainwright's debut, but persuaded Dreamworks label boss Lenny Waronker to sign 'the Montreal kid' after Loudon passed him a tape. Michael Stipe is a fan. The thank yous on the sleeve to his new album, Want One , span everyone from Leonard Cohen to Beth Orton, via David Bowie, Elton John and both Pet Shop Boys. Tellingly, though, the thanks end: 'This album is dedicated to me.' 'Life is beautiful' was not the headline that appeared in the New York Times at the end of August. 'Rufus Wainwright Journeys To "Gay Hell" And Back' screamed the normally restrained arts section. Wainwright - who has never been coy about his sexual preference - unveiled details of a depression and hedonistic lifestyle that had led to a breakdown, a month in rehab and, ultimately, to his latest album, Want One. There were ' Boogie Nights moments'. There were assignations with men picked up on the internet. There were rampant weekends lost to crystal meth - metamphetamine - and other drugs, described by Wainwright as a 'gay hell' of unfettered indulgence and chemical derangement. Specifically, he wanted to warn the world - and other gay men - about crystal meth. 'I went blind at one point,' he laughs mirthlessly. 'I was constantly sweating. Every time I brushed my teeth I would spit up blood. By the end, I couldn't go an hour without weeping. I felt like I was in a museum, and life was the painting. I was looking at this beautiful painting, but I was not really in it. I was inconsolable.' There had been warning signs that the partying was getting the better of him, but he'd ignored them. 'I remember at one point, before I went away' - Wainwright's shorthand for rehab - 'I was at this party, I was trashed and this woman...' he tails off. 'It's funny, this whole idea of the paparazzi as an evil force that kills you. This is actually a story where the paparazzi saved my life,' he laughs. 'Anyway, this woman who's a photographer, a paparazzo, she said, "Rufus, Rufus, we're really worried about you, a lot of people are very worried." And of course, I immediately assumed she was talking about my career - ha! - that I wasn't as famous as Ryan Adams, that I wasn't doing as well as The White Stripes. I had no idea she was talking about my self.' He spent a month in Minnesota, at the Hazelden clinic, detoxing and undergoing therapy. Upon his release, he set to work on an opulent double album ( Want Two follows next year) that redoubled his commitment to lush, operatic pop scores and hit that little bit harder. Produced by Marius De Vries, known for his work with Madonna and Bjvrk, Want One is a much darker work than previous Wainwright albums, chronicling his 'bitter knowledge' and desire for redemption with the same candour and elegance with which Poses - its predecessor - flirted and preened. On the cover, Wainwright is a knight lost in a dark wood, a single rose his only comfort. Inside the CD booklet the knight lies wounded, or dead. Or asleep. 'I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites,' he explains, 'Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame. But also I'm pretty much drenched in fairy tales and recently, when I went through this stuff, and as I was making the album, a lot of those old stories and legends became very central to my recovery. In the present world, this technological, psychotic, politicised, nonsensical world, you have to believe that the good guys are going to win! That evil will be banished somehow!' In many ways, Wainwright's chemical 'fall from grace' (his words) came as a surprise. He had never made a secret of his appetites, and even his mother has called him 'a party animal'. On Poses , he went so far as to write a song about them. 'Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk' mischievously detailed Wainwright's various Achilles' heels. There was his tendency to go 'a little bit heiress/ A little bit Irish/ A little bit Tower of Pisa'. But the impression Wainwright gave in song and in interviews was of a clever young man raised around musicians and their bohemian ways, and in control of the good-time whirl around him. He was friends with Lorca Cohen (Leonard's daughter) and Teddy Thompson (Richard and Linda's son) and went on tour with Sean Lennon. Wainwright seemed at ease, too, with his sexuality, with his penchant for high art and opera, an anachronism in the pop world. He was, frankly, a little bit decadent. It was part of his charm. The worst danger? That the good-looking, single, twentysomething buck-about-town might get a bit full of himself. But pride came before a fall. 'I definitely thought while making Poses that I could sit in this comfy loge or something, and observe the plebeians down in the cesspool, falling like flies,' he remembers. 'I didn't need to eat well. I didn't need to see the sun! But Poses was definitely a prophetic album. There was this friend of mine who I actually wrote a lot of Poses about. He was really screwed up. Little did I know I was writing about myself at the same time.' The first the world knew of Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright was in a song by his father, Loudon Wainwright III; 'Rufus is a Tit Man' detailed the friendly rivalry between babe and dad for the McGarrigle mammary. It was to be followed by 'First Born' by the McGarrigle sisters. And there have been more, including a song by Rufus's sister, Martha, and one by the Canadian band Sloan in 1999 which presciently fretted: 'Take Good Care of the Poor Boy'. When his parents' union broke up, Rufus and Martha remained with McGarrigle. They toured with the McGarrigle sisters and saw their father during the holidays. Wainwright revisits the trauma of his father's departure on Want One . The last song on the album, 'Dinner at Eight', was written in the aftermath of a furious row between father and son. It pulls no punches. 'No matter how strong/ I'm going to take you down with one little stone,' mouths Rufus sweetly. 'I'm going to break you down and see/ What you're really worth to me.' At its heart is the image of a young child left 'in the drifting snow'. His mother cried when she heard it. His father took it rather better. 'I warned him first, "Dad, there's this song I'm putting on the record, I wrote it about you, after we had that huge fight years ago." I actually forgot it for a couple of years, but it came back to me. I said, "I hope you're not offended." And he said, "You know, Rufus, I've written so many songs about other people, whatever it is, I probably deserve it."' Wainwright laughs. 'And when I actually played it for him, he loved it.' It's worth noting that the hurt, resentment and yearning of 'Dinner at Eight' is matched elsewhere in Wainwright's works with great love and admiration for his father. Rufus covered one of Loudon's songs, 'One Man Guy', on Poses , and on Want 's title track, he sings: 'I just want to be my Dad/ With a small sprinkling of my mother.' Wainwright realised he was gay in his early teens. When he was 14, an encounter with an older man in London took an ugly turn and Wainwright was sexually assaulted. 'I don't consider it a brutal rape or anything,' he says. 'But none the less, I'm still dealing with it.' He feels the 'derangement' of his recent depression and promiscuity is linked to this incident, among other things. After that episode, he was packed off to Millbrook, the boarding school used as a backdrop in Dead Poets Society , a period he's described as a chance to regain his innocence. He dropped out of both of Montreal's English-language universities, McGill and Concordia, after studying piano and art. Recently, Wainwright contributed a track to a charity album in aid of the Harvey Milk school, a high school for gay teenagers in New York. What does he think of the school, given the mixed feelings some commentators have voiced about ghettoising the kids there? 'I haven't actually walked around it,' he begins, 'but frankly, I'm so into gay rights now, gay marriage, gay schools, because it so angers Republicans. So it's great.' The NYT received a number of letters after Wainwright's revelations, many in support of Wainwright's forthrightness and new sobriety. A few, though, pointed out that 'gay hell' wasn't quite the right name for a narcotic inferno of Wainwright's own making. Wainwright sees their point. But he sticks to his guns. 'When I talk about it being a gay hell, every gay man knows exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, a lot of it was my own doing, but there is a drug-infested, sexually very promiscuous, very unsafe-sex part of gay life. It just can't be ignored.' In some ways, the lurid topics that have recently featured in discussions about Wainwright are at serious odds with his art. In Wainwright's work, everything comes back to love. He romanticises wildly: his men have tended to be rebel princes or evil angels, his songs set in graveyards or Greece when they're not on 14th Street. Most of all, Want 's protagonists yearn for a soulmate. Ironic, then, that this romantic has never experienced true love himself. 'I still believe that love is the most powerful force in the world, even though I am yet to experience it fully. But I will!' After Want Two comes out, Wainwright is thinking of getting away from himself as a subject. Having written for the Moulin Rouge soundtrack and contributed a Leonard Cohen cover to Shrek, he's crossing over onto the screen in Martin Scorsese's new film, The Aviator, where he plays a club singer. 'I'd like to make a shift, and maybe focus more on theatre or opera, or songs about something other than me. I really have scraped the barrel for these two albums.' But he doesn't regret his honesty, in song or interview. And really, the fearlessness with which Wainwright examines himself is what makes him such a compelling figure. It's art, but it's necessity too. 'You know,' he confides, 'I'm a terrible liar. Watching me play poker is like...' He scrabbles to find a simile for his transparency: 'Watching me play poker. It's not pretty!' When I ask him what his Prince Charming would be like, were he to arrive, he thinks for a moment. 'Me,' he says finally. 'On this album, I am my own Prince Charming.' 7 Rufus Wainwright plays a sold-out gig at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 tonight. . . . is anyone going to see him? oh, i do wish he'd tour australia one day ... heidi. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 17:15:39 +0200 (CEST) From: Yngve Hauge Subject: Thought I had seen it all ... Hi you all, Just as you thought you has seen it all the record industry does it again : http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/8/201119/758 - -- Yngve ****************************************** * E-mail: onealien@mo.himolde.no ********* * Cell: +47 41330571 ********************* ***** Blessed be!!! ********************** ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 17:33:49 +0200 From: Stefan Adler Subject: AW: Thought I had seen it all ... How could you send me such a link during my Sunday dinner ... I almost had to clean my keyboard ;) Honestly: How long will it take 'til jokes like these become reality? - -----Ursprungliche Nachricht----- Von: owner-ecto@smoe.org [mailto:owner-ecto@smoe.org]Im Auftrag von Yngve Hauge Gesendet: Sonntag, 12. Oktober 2003 17:16 An: The Fuzzyblue Universe Betreff: Thought I had seen it all ... Hi you all, Just as you thought you has seen it all the record industry does it again : http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/8/201119/758 - -- Yngve ****************************************** * E-mail: onealien@mo.himolde.no ********* * Cell: +47 41330571 ********************* ***** Blessed be!!! ********************** ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 12:02:44 -0400 From: Jeff Wasilko Subject: Amy Fairchild Houseconcert in Boston (October 19 4pm) Amy Fairchild was a great discovery at Ectofest. A few years later, I saw her open for Jennifer Kimball, and I vowed I should try to see Amy more often. Little did I know she'd be moving from NYC to the same town I live in! Sensitive introspection, a sharp melodic radar, rock and roll's rebellious energy, and an intuitive feel for the understated power of an acoustic guitar and a good lyric all inform her music and distinguish Amy as a dynamic performer. The Berkshire Eagle also picked her performance at Club Helsinki in Great Barrington on February 28th as one of the Top 10 Concerts in 2002 saying "Fairchild combines the literate intimacy of a new-folk singer-songwriter, the unerring pop-rock instincts of a Sheryl Crow, and the moves of a rock goddess." Amy was a 1999 Lilith Fair Talent Search winner, and she performed at the Jones Beach stop of the tour. Last year, the first track on her CD "Falling Down" won Grand Prize in the Pop Category of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest! You can sample Amy's music at CD Baby: http://cdbaby.com/cd/amyfairchild2 And her web site is: http://www.amyfairchild.com/ Now for the details: Sunday, October 19 2003 Join us at 4pm for snacks and drinks Mail yhc@smoe.org for reservations and directions The suggested donation is $10, which all goes to the performer. My house is just 2 blocks away from the Wakefield commuter rail station, and is just a few miles from Route 128, with plenty of on-street parking. Upcoming concerts: Anne Heaton, Sunday April 25th 2004 @ 4pm http://www.anneheaton.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 16:50:40 -0400 (EDT) From: stumck@webtv.net (stuart mckenney) Subject: Lene Marlin hi -- i caught a couple of mentions here recently of lene marlin's new album "another day," but they were primarily in reference to the ongoing discussion of copy-protected cds and i didn't see any comments about the music itself. i have her 'playing my game' cd from 1999 and a couple of singles from that era -- is the new material similar? her official site hasn't gone "live" yet so there aren't any soundclips there. thanks for any opinions, stuart ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V9 #289 **************************