ShareThisBy NEVA CHONIN
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Last year or thereabouts, Rufus Wainwright -- gay messiah, rebel prince, pop star -- was riding through the Austrian Alps with his boyfriend when inspiration struck.
"All of a sudden," he recalls, "I sat up in the car and started singing the song that became 'Release the Stars.' It was a possession, like a light shining off of a glacier had blinded me."
That song, about his friend Lorca Cohen (daughter of Leonard Cohen), also became the title track for an album that might be the most significant in Wainwright's brief and still-brilliant career.
At least this is how Wainwright tells it. With his soft, brown eyes, dark, flopping hair and deep burgundy dress shirt, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter resembles an elegantly sartorial fawn: two parts Nijinsky, one part Bambi, with a dish of Debussy on the side.
"Release the Stars," in stores this week, is his fifth studio album, and the first Wainwright has produced himself, with some oversight by the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant.
The past year has seen other firsts for Wainwright. In June, his audacious decision to perform Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall concert album in its entirety over two nights in that same venue made him the hottest ticket of the season. Then the New York Metropolitan Opera commissioned Wainwright to write his first opera.
A gay icon, Wainwright has had his share of encounters with young acolytes who seek him out hoping he'll provide meaning to their lives, or, barring that, a quick roll in the starry hay.
"Thank God I have a boyfriend now, or I'd just be a molester," Wainwright says of his partner of two years, Jorn Weisbrodt, concert manager for the Berlin State Opera. "I'm really happy with my status in terms of encouraging young gay people, but I feel that my main enemy in that spectrum is actually gay culture -- I'm probably more critical of gay culture than I am of fundamentalist Christian culture. I worry about these kids who grow up in the Midwest, move to New York or L.A. and go from the frying pan into the fire. Yes, they're getting away from their parents, but then they're being surrounded by consumerized beauty and fascistic body insanity."
"It used to be different," Wainwright says. "There was a period when you ran away from the Midwest and went to New York to live as a gay man, and it really was an incredibly meaningful, even spiritual experience. Now it's all homogenous homosexuality, and that's almost worse than ending up in the closet. I don't think that being gay always has to be bizarre and interesting, but I do think that in life in general you should try to edify yourself."
By fate or plan, Wainwright's own life has never failed to be bizarre, interesting and occasionally perilous. Six years ago, the singer's fierce addiction to crystal meth had friends and family convinced he wouldn't live to see his 30th birthday. At one point, he literally didn't see anything -- the drug had caused him to go temporarily blind.
Finally, something convinced Wainwright he needed help. He called his friend Elton John, who helped him check into rehab at Minnesota's Hazelden Foundation for detox and therapy. Wainwright got clean and went on to write his two critically acclaimed "Want" albums.
If, at times, Wainwright's life seems to achieve drama of operatic proportions, it's probably because he has soaked up opera like a sponge. This should come in handy as he works on his commission for the Met, a work he calls "Prima Donna" that traces a day in the life of an opera singer.
Opera aside, Wainwright's primary focus is "Release the Stars," an album he says signals a shift in his songwriting and aesthetic. Where earlier albums reveled in the singer's talent for droll introspection, on his new CD, he turns his gaze outward to contemplate other stars: Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Judy Garland.
"How great it would have been if they'd been released from their contracts and been allowed to live their own lives instead of being slaves to Hollywood?" he says. "I guess, in the end, the bigger meaning of the title is that it's time to break the contracts and let the crazy people roam and love and do what they need to do."
On past albums, Wainwright says, he was "really into the crepuscular, vapory sensibility of being the waifish prince. I love that whole period of my life, but this is more like, 'Let's sit down. I need to talk to you.' "
Metaphorically and technically, then, Wainwright is now his own producer. What's the best part about this new role? He smirks.
"I don't have to pay myself."
(E-mail Neva Chonin at nchonin(at)sfchronicle.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)
