Wanted Man

Turns out Rufus Wainwright was writing songs about "survival in the face of pending doom."

by A.D. Amorosi

The ruminations of the lonely are music’s most tremulous topic. The suicidal desperation of Madame Butterfly, the drunken moan of Sinatra, the teardrops, cried and implied, by Britney Spears -- all portray solitary fear.

To Rufus Wainwright, the desire to have and to hold -- to face the struggle of eternal love -- is crucial to his new CD, Want One (DreamWorks). The first of two parts, Want One's trembling tenor voices, windingly theatrical melodies and opulent arrangements are the setting for Wainwright's blistered, baleful, blood-lusted lyrics. Like Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, the disc is a display of the fantastic at odds with its own fabulousness -- dire, lonely men stuck with nothing but fashion magazines, drugs and empty sexcapades, watching the towering Babel of Manhattan explode around them.

Wainwright knows the feeling well. "I've been pondering the fact that the apocalypse could be around the corner," he says, barely containing a laugh.

Writing songs like "Want," "Gay Messiah" and "Old Whore's Diet" (the latter two are from Want Two; "With those titles, I have to get One to succeed in Wal-Mart first") required a certain urgency. This wasn't just because they were sandwiched between 9/11 and the start of war with Iraq, but because they signaled the end of Wainwright's own Rimbaud-like season of hell -- a decadent time that, famously, included anonymous sex, the doldrums of celebrity and crystal meth, a particularly nasty drug. "Crystal is so consuming. It grabs you in such a quick all-encompassing manner." But its consumption can be, for a fleeting moment, fun.

That freedom to consume and be consumed is his birthright, what with having a mother who's Kate McGarrigle, a father who's Loudon Wainwright III and a society taken in by the glimmer of fame.

"There was no way around that -- that's the sorcery of songwriting," he says of his abuses and their connection to manifest destiny. "I thought I was writing, throughout Poses [his second CD], songs about someone else. Little did I know I was writing these prophetic songs about me being drunk and wearing flip-flops along Fifth Avenue."

In a shining-celeb culture filled with hidden excesses mediated by forgiveness, Wainwright -- a gay man who's been out since his teen years -- has been nothing but forthright. "I crave honesty," he says. "I might want to, after all this, recede into a character again in my songs, as it's been a bit much having to write and talk about me all the time."

But discussing his life, then and now -- his former druggie existence, his yearning for love at any cost, the foibles and finery of gayness as well as the cult of personality that surrounds us -- rolls off his tongue like lines from a Noel Coward play.

"I remember being at a party for The Strokes [documented in the song "I Don't Know What It Is,'], wondering what it was these people were celebrating. They were like chickens with their heads cut off. At first I thought I was writing about "the nature of fame.' Turned out I was writing about my own survival in the face of pending doom."

The dulling of gay culture was also on his mind as he watched the legacy built by homosexual arts and artists derailed by the current culture that's dedicated to weight-lifting health-clubbers or Queer Eye fashionistas. "I find it's a privilege to be gay. I've been witness to a tremendous history without having to worry about looking for alternatives to that," he says, pointing to the good fortune of being raised by musical legends. "I don't want the greatness of gay culture to be lost in the whole cookie-cutter gay-guy thing you see now. But it probably will."

Where Want One was concerned, Wainwright decided to go for the jugular, both in terms of cagey, biting songwriting and the operatic sensibilities of the album's dramatic orchestrations and lush production courtesy of Marius DeVries (Björk, Moulin Rouge). "I'm excited for a period wherein I have to rein things in, tone them down in terms of production. But if a label gives you that budget, you take it."

So he wrote the jazzy black-widow seduction of "Harvester of Hearts," about a straight boy he bedded, and a delicately angry "Vicious World," soaked in vibrating Fender Rhodes, to laugh through the horror of his everyday. "It's my rainbow-colored coffin of a song." If "Go or Go Ahead" was written as a misery's-depth centerpiece of his meth experiences (penned after a four-day binge he's adamant about not advocating) then the divine "14th Street" is a deliciously funny post-rehab riposte meant to "signal my glorious return to New York society from my west-of-Mississippi rest place." This leaves us with "Dinner at Eight," the bittersweet love letter to an often-absent dad, to

whom Wainwright admits he’s so similar. "In certain ways, mind you," he giggles. "I don’t think I’ll be exactly that person. But if I could be the same, that’d be great." Yes, he laughs when he says that. But he is quick to say that his parents’ example of health and dignity is a beacon of sorts. "We are genetically programmed. So from him and her I get the tools to get by. Combined, I’ll then be the perfect middle-aged fag."

Take Wainwright’s amusing words on aging, combine that with Want One’s seesawing sense of loneliness and his post-addiction torpor and add in a cover painting portraying him as an armored Prince Charming and I wonder: For a man so in love with opera, figuratively and literally, what could his newest two CDs be comparable to?

"It could be Wagnerian. The Ring Cycle. You know -- all about the gods." Asking forgiveness for "getting all German," he stops. "No. It’s like Tannhauser looking for redemption. I’m not a religious man, not an organized religion anyway. But I want that spiritual center."

With Want One, Rufus Wainwright’s center is coated in caramel and barbed wire, a cookie filled with arsenic with just a hint of leather and lace.

Rufus Wainwright plays Fri., Nov. 21, 8 p.m., $27.50, with Teddy Thompson, Tower Theater, 69th and Ludlow sts., Upper Darby, 215-336-2000.