Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright earned Juno victories and Grammy nominations as a singer/songwriter whose ornate, dramatic pop revives echoes of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, cabaret stages, and full-scale opera. He first appeared with the well-received self-titled debut album in 1998. Moving swiftly from local club residencies to global headline billing, his fifth studio effort, Release the Stars from 2007, marked his strongest commercial showing yet, reaching the Top 30 on the Billboard 200 while climbing as high as the Top Five in both the United Kingdom and Norway. Honoring the vocal tradition and her status as a gay icon, he issued the Judy Garland tribute Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall that same year, his initial live recording. Testing his skills at composition and orchestration, he introduced his first opera, Prima Donna, in 2009, with a recording issued in 2015, and followed with 2016’s Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, which adapted selected poems to his music and featured guests such as Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. Eight years after his previous pop project, he delivered Unfollow the Rules in 2020. Highlighting his wide-ranging reach, Wainwright explored his family’s folk heritage on the star-studded Folkocracy in 2023, then merged Verdi’s “Requiem” with Byron’s poem “Darkness” in the expansive classical piece Dream Requiem, performed with Meryl Streep, Anna Prohaska, and the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France under Mikko Franck.

Born Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright in New York’s Hudson Valley in 1973, he is the child of folk figures Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. His parents separated during his childhood, after which he grew up with his mother in Montreal. He began piano lessons at age six, and by thirteen he was on tour with his mother, aunt Anna, and sister Martha under the name the McGarrigle Sisters and Family. The next year brought a Juno nomination for Most Promising Young Artist, while his song “I’m A-Runnin’” received a simultaneous Genie nomination for Best Song in a Film, appearing in the 1988 release Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller.

Openly gay already in his teens, Wainwright turned to opera for comfort during adolescence and developed deep admiration for Édith Piaf, Al Jolson, and Judy Garland. Following studies at the Millbrook School in upstate New York, he briefly enrolled in music courses at Montreal’s McGill University before shifting focus from classical training to pop and rock. Establishing himself on the Montreal club scene, he recorded early demos with producer Pierre Marchand. Loudon Wainwright III passed a copy of the tape to Van Dyke Parks, who then gave it to DreamWorks executive Lenny Waronker; the label signed Wainwright soon afterward, leading to the May 1998 release of Rufus Wainwright. Co-produced by Marchand and Jon Brion, the album appeared on multiple critics’ “Best of 1998” lists and won the Juno for Best Alternative Album. Over the following years he toured extensively and contributed occasional tracks to soundtracks such as Shrek and compilations including The McGarrigle Hour. His second album, Poses, earned comparable praise upon its mid-2001 arrival and secured him another Juno in the alternative category.

After touring solo and alongside Tori Amos through much of 2001 and 2002, Wainwright entered Bearsville Studio in Woodstock, New York, with producer Marius de Vries to cut what became a double-album project. Want One appeared in September 2003, with Want Two arriving a year later. In 2007 he released both Release the Stars and Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, a recreation of Garland’s celebrated 1961 Judy at Carnegie Hall concert. Release the Stars reached number 23 on the Billboard 200 and number two on the U.K. album chart, both personal bests. Early in 2009 the live album earned Wainwright his first Grammy nomination, in Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

Wainwright introduced his sixth studio album, the minimalist All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, in 2010, a twelve-track set shaped by Shakespeare and built almost entirely around voice and piano. The next year he began work on his seventh album, aiming to recapture the richly textured pop of his initial releases. Produced by Mark Ronson and featuring contributions from artists such as Amy Winehouse and Adele, Out of the Game arrived in May 2012. It was succeeded in 2014 by the concert recording Live from the Artist’s Den and the retrospective Vibrate: The Best of Rufus Wainwright.

Deutsche Grammophon issued a recording of his debut opera, the French-language Prima Donna, in 2015 and followed with Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets the next April. Three of the sonnets had originated on Songs for Lulu but were newly arranged for the project, which marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and included film actors, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, soprano Anna Prohaska, and his sister Martha. In 2020 Wainwright resumed his singer/songwriter pop direction with the Mitchell Froom-produced Unfollow the Rules, his first release for BMG; guitar work came from Blake Mills and drumming from Matt Chamberlain and Jim Keltner, the last of whom had played on his debut album. The concert album Unfollow the Rules: The Paramour Session, captured at Los Angeles’ Paramour Mansion in 2020 and containing two previously unheard songs, appeared the following year. BMG released highlights from the livestream Rufus Does Judy at Capitol Studios in 2022, a four-piece jazz arrangement of Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall performed for a single in-person listener, Academy Award-winning actress Renée Zellweger, with a guest appearance by Kristin Chenoweth.

Folkocracy, issued on BMG in June 2023, presented a broadly defined collection of folk covers, many of them traditional, produced and shaped with Froom and featuring John Legend, Brandi Carlile, David Byrne, and assorted family members. The subsequent year Wainwright revisited classical terrain with the large-scale Dream Requiem, issued in January 2025. The work unites Verdi’s “Requiem” and Byron’s poem “Darkness,” recorded live at Auditorium de Radio France in Paris with soprano Anna Prohaska, the Chœur de Radio France, the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France led by Mikko Franck, and narration supplied by Meryl Streep.