An Unhealthy Obsession With Mark Ronson

Rufus Wainwright is leading a somewhat schizophrenic musical existence of late: “I have been composing my second opera, Hadrian – it’s about the emperor Hadrian – at daytime and then, at night, I’ve been recording some new pop songs. So my whole thing right now is, you know, ‘Rufus Wainwright: Opera Composer By Day And Popstar By Night’.” Hadrian, Wainwright’s second opera (following up Prima Donna), is scheduled for a world premiere in the Canadian Opera Company’s 2018/2019 season. This duality gives Wainwright an idea: “I think it would make a very good comic strip, actually. Believe it or not, I love drawing comic books as well so I’d probably do it myself. One day, one day when I lose my voice.”     

During Wainwright’s last shows on our shores, “Rufus Apollo” included a “Bacchanalian dance party” encore that left many scratching their heads. “It was fun,” Wainwright stresses. “I think most of the audience enjoyed it. I think that there was a percentage that were truly horrified and thought that I was desecrating their sacred stage, their sacred theatrical temple, but, ah, that’s when you know it’s really effective is when there’s a portion of the audience that are, you know, not happy.” Wainwright laughs easily and definitely gets a kick out of challenging the norm. “Whether it’s in the pop world or the opera world, I mean, the minute someone says, ‘Okay, this is how it has to be,’ or, ‘This is what you should be accomplishing,’ or, ‘This is the way it’s done,’ I’m like , ‘Okay, well that’s not the way it’s gonna happen!’” he guffaws.

His last set Out Of The Game (Wainwright’s seventh studio album) was produced by Mark Ronson and Wainwright admits that while he’s “still very much enamoured of [Ronson]”, immediately after spending “intimate time together in the studio” he was a goner: “At that point I think I was truly obsessed and in love [laughs]... I used to call him ‘Dreamboat’.” The praise continues: “I dunno if [Out Of The Game is] my best record, but I do know that it’s my favourite-sounding record. I think the quality that Mark gets in terms of recording vocals and instrumentalists is really second to none I mean, there’s a certain warmth and depth and easiness to it... and there’s nothing precious about it.” While Wainwright says he’d love to work with Ronson again down the track, he hasn’t yet given the producer’s latest smash colllab with Bruno Mars, Uptown Funk, a spin. “I don’t think I listen to Bruno Mars out of pure jealousy,” he jokes. “He’s getting more Mark time than me these days so I can’t.”

If you haven’t heard Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk (from Wainwright’s second longplayer Poses), this scribe recommends you do so. Sharpish. “What’s great about that song, for me, is that on one hand it’s very uptempo, and it kinda gets the audience rocking out and has a kind of festive feel to it, but then, of course, at the end, it ends up being just as depressing, ha! And disastrous and dark as any other part of my material, you know. I yank the public back into their true morose state,” he chuckles. “The ice breaks and you’re drowning in the freezing water again.”

On whether he often sees tears streaming down the faces of audience members when looking out into the crowd, Wainwright offers, “I very rarely look at the audience. I like to actually sing with my eyes closed just, you know, try and see colours and shapes and kind of hallucinate slightly, um, because, believe it or not, I’m quite shy, occasionally. But there have been times when I venture to stare and Australia is one of those places especially, ‘cause everybody’s so good looking [laughs]. I don’t tend to look out too much when I’m, you know, in parts of England, but [in] Australia I like to take a few peeks at your fine folk.”

It’s coming up to ten years since Wainwright’s Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall tribute shows and subsequent album, and Wainwright confesses, “I have been toying with the idea of striking up the band once more and taking another shot at that material due to the ten-year anniversary, but I’m not sure whether to do that or not. So that is a possibility, but we’ll see. But I love singing those songs and considering that when I sang them I’d just learned them, really, and Judy [Garland] who at that time – you know, when she recorded that album in the ‘60s – she’d been singing them since she was, like, four years old so she had a good, you know, 30 years on me. I think that I did pretty well.”

One of Garland’s daughters Lorna Luft loaned her pipes to the project (“Lorna was fantastic. She was a little trooper”) as did various members of Wainwright’s famous family: his sister Martha and late mother Kate McGarrigle. Wainwright’s family ties charted his showbiz future and he reflects, “I started so young. I mean, arguably I was about six or seven ‘cause, you know, my mum and my aunt [Anna McGarrigle] – the McGarrigle Sisters – used to bring my sister and I out on the road and we sang. So we had, I had, a connection with show business really for as long as I can remember. I feel like there might’ve been gigs in there where I did feel, you know, underappreciated or that I wasn’t hitting the mark or that I was struggling to be noticed, but on the other hand I just kept my eyes on the horizon and always had a way of visualising my imminent destiny. And so far it seems to have turned out how I imagined, so I dunno what that’s about but that’s the way it happened.

“I think there’s something in having that kind of confidence when you’re extremely young, which is an important factor in being an artist when you’re older. I mean, I would say that most performers – you can tell kind of right off the cuff [whether] they are gonna be successful or not, because they’re just steamrolling full steam ahead to get to that stage.”