Want One

Rufus Wainwright

album cover

You Want This One

By the time he made his third album, the enormously gifted pianist, singer, and songwriter Rufus Wainwright had lived through his share of tumult. He was born into a family of musicians—his mother is Kate McGarrigle, of the Quebec McGarrigles (see p. 489), and his father is folksinger and humorist Loudon Wainwright III, who immortalized his infant son's early proclivities with the song "Rufus Is a Tit Man." The couple divorced when Rufus was young, and looking back, he recalls being devastated by it. If anything, the family business complicated things. After his critically fawned-over debut in 1998, Wainwright had public feuds with his dad, celebrated his homosexuality, struggled openly with addiction to crystal meth, and did flamboyant things like re-creating the entire program of Judy Garland's legendary 1961 performance at Carnegie Hall (see page 300).

A moody tunesmith with an ear for opera and a taste for the killer knock-you-off-your-feet hook, Wainwright reached a creative peak with his third album, Want One, which stands among the most florid, downright ambitious song cycles in pop history.

How ambitious? Track one begins as a solemn processional, a little melody hummed by monks as they file into morning prayers. Three minutes later, it's ballooned into a Clockwork Orange carnival, with a pealing orchestra storming center stage. The "theme" it plays is an interpolation of Maurice Ravel's Bolero, and Wainwright sails above it, singing about the happy headlines he'd like to see on the front page of The New York Times. From there, Want One is by turns glorious and garish. Its songs ponder romantic obsession in every flavor imaginable: There are vulnerable little jazz waltzes ("Vicious World") and lazy, lilting music-theater dance routines ("Harvester of Hearts"), anthems that try, in vain, to pin down vague longing ("I Don't Know What It Is"), futile declarations ("My phone's on vibrate for you"), and amped-up guitar rockers ("Movies of Myself," a caustic comment on reality TV and the self-mythologizing impulse). At one point Wainwright describes his writing as "a bucket of rhymes I threw up somewhere," but don't believe him: His slouchy, just-woke-up singing is the only casual thing about this stunner.

Genre: Rock
Released: 2003, Dreamworks
Key Tracks: "Harvester of Hearts," "Oh What a World," "Movies of Myself," "Go or Go Ahead," "Vibrate"
Catalog Choice: Poses; Want Two
Next Stop: Elliott Smith: XO
After That: Duncan Sheik: Brighter/Later
Book Page: 841