Rufus Wainwright

Montreal to DreamWorks

Rufus Wainwright was born in Rhinebeck, New York, and spent most of his youth in Montreal. He started on the piano at six and began touring at 13, and opera became a lasting influence on his own songs. In the summer of 1995 he played weekly shows at Cafe Sarajevo in Montreal and cut demo tapes produced by Pierre Marchand. The tapes reached the DreamWorks executive Lenny Waronker through Van Dyke Parks, and DreamWorks signed him in 1996.

Waronker paired him with the producer Jon Brion in Los Angeles. They spent most of 1996 and 1997 recording 56 songs on 62 rolls of tape, at a cost of more than $700,000, then cut the pile to twelve for Rufus Wainwright, released on 19 May 1998. No singles came from it and it did not chart, but it reached 24 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers list. Rolling Stone named him its Best New Artist of 1998, and the album won a Juno Award for Best Alternative Album.

Poses

Poses followed on 5 June 2001. Most of it was written during a six-month stay at New York's Chelsea Hotel, and the title song grew out of that stay. Pierre Marchand produced most of it, with Alex Gifford, Ethan Johns, Damian LeGassick and Greg Wells each handling single tracks. It opens with Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk. Poses entered the Billboard 200 at 117, topped the Top Heatseekers chart and won the Juno for Best Alternative Album in 2002. Pitchfork gave it 8.6.

Want One and Want Two

The two albums at the center of his career were conceived as one. Want One came out on 23 September 2003 on DreamWorks, produced by Marius de Vries and mixed by Andy Bradfield, with Waronker overseeing production. It was recorded at The Maid's Room and other New York studios, at Bearsville and at the Strongroom in London, and its guests include Martha Wainwright, Joan Wasser, Teddy Thompson and Linda Thompson. It opens with Oh What a World, which quotes Ravel's Boléro, and its first single was I Don't Know What It Is. It closes with Dinner at Eight. Want One reached 60 on the Billboard 200. Pitchfork gave it 6.9 and called it top-heavy, with the best material in the first half hour.

Want Two followed on 16 November 2004, produced by de Vries and Wainwright, after four of its songs appeared on the iTunes EP Waiting for a Want in the summer. Wainwright described it as the darker sibling. It holds Gay Messiah, Anohni sharing the lead vocal on Old Whore's Diet, and The Art Teacher, taken from a live recording. It reached 103 in the US and 21 in the UK. Alexis Petridis of the Guardian gave it four stars and called it a stunning album. The pair were repackaged as Want in November 2005, and both appear in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Release the Stars and after

Release the Stars arrived on 15 May 2007 on Geffen. Wainwright produced it with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys as executive producer, and sessions took in Berlin, New York and London. It reached 2 in the UK and 23 in the US, and went gold in the UK and Canada. Its first single was Going to a Town. In June 2006 he had played the whole of Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall concert there over two nights, and the live album Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall was released on 4 December 2007.

He then turned to opera. Prima Donna was first staged at the Manchester International Festival on 10 July 2009, and Hadrian opened at the Canadian Opera Company in 2018. Out of the Game, produced by Mark Ronson, appeared in 2012, Unfollow the Rules in July 2020 and Folkocracy in June 2023. His cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is on the Shrek soundtrack album.

On 5 September 2023 he played both Want albums at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Sarah Hicks. Dorian Lynskey of the Guardian called them his twin peaks as a songwriter. The opera Dream Requiem premiered in 2024, and the live album I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill came out on 21 November 2025.