Rufus Wainwright Returns to His Family’s Folk Roots—with the Help of Some Friends

Post-pandemic, many musicians are only now getting the artistic automobile out of the garage and getting the engine gently purring again. But meanwhile, composer Rufus Wainwright is already tooling down the boulevard at breakneck speed in his stylish Stutz-Bearcat, racing goggles firmly in place and scarf whipping madly behind him. And it’s an easy image to picture. Every move the pianist/guitarist makes always radiates class, often with a rare retro-chic edge, such as his 2007 Judy Garland-honoring live set, Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall; his two intricate operas, Prima Donna and Hadrian; a musical interpretation of nine Shakespearean sonnets (2016’s Take All My Loves, initially penned for edgy theater director Robert Wilson); and—starting with his eclectic self-titled debut in 1998—an inventive series of solo albums leading to his Grammy-nominated Unfollow the Rules in 2020. But after 2022’s time-traveling Rufus Does Judy at Capitol Studios, 2023 finds Wainwright’s productive speed increasing with: a new 25th-anniversary remastering of Rufus Wainwright; a weeklong celebration of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill lieder he just wrapped in New York City; and an upcoming 50th birthday performance July 13 at the Montauk Point Lighthouse (a benefit for the Montauk Historical Society) wryly dubbed “Fifty Isn’t the End.”

Also, this Friday, June 2, Wainwright kicks off his tour with a one-night only gig at L.A.s Walt Disney Concert Hall, celebrating—with some very special guests—his adventurous new album, released the same day, the vintage folk-fueled covers set Folkocracy. And the title suggests the underlying truth—that the man is, in fact, folk royalty, as in the son of Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle, and brother to Martha Wainwright and stepbrother to Lucy Wainwright Roche, as well. And over the years, he’s amassed so many talented friends that the 15-track Folkocracy boasts a stellar cameo on almost every number, including John Legend (“Heading For Home”), Brandi Carlile (“Down in the Willow Garden”), David Byrne (“High on a Rocky Ledge”), Nicole Scherzinger (the Hawaiian ballad “Kaulan Na Pua”), and the late Van Dyke Parks (“Black Gold”). Not that he needed them. As his haunting, acrobatic solo vocal on the traditional “Shenandoah” makes clear, Wainwright can sing the hell out of this rustic songbook all by himself, sans guest stars. All he needed was keen-eared producer Mitchell Froom in the studio to capture all the magic. “So yeah,” the vocalist understates. “I guess you could say that I’m back at it!” He recently hit the brakes long enough to talk to Paste.

Paste: Last time we spoke, during the pandemic, you’d just gotten a puppy, and you were traveling the country in an Airstream motorhome. Then it seems like you finally just parked it and got busy working.

Rufus Wainwright: Well, Now we have a full-grown dog, our little Siegfried. He’s a miniature Australian shepherd. And I think when the pandemic hit, on the one hand, I was able to stop working, because we postponed the release of Unfollow the Rules, and then I canceled a few tours and stuff. And with that being said, pretty quickly the money worries came up, and also, I tend to get antsy in general, so I started writing a lot, and I started really working a lot just at home—I was composing things and having a lot of ideas, and was feeling replenished after awhile.

Paste: How is your daughter, Viva? Did she come through all of this unscathed?

Wainwright: I think she’s…she’s…Look, we were fortunate that our daughter was the perfect age for the lockdown, you know? She was eight years old, nine, so she was into being home and into spending more time with me, because I had been on the road a lot. So we actually got the time to really bond, due to the pandemic. So I have to say that it was somewhat good for us, in a way. And there were difficult points, of course, but I think if she had been a teenager, gunning to get out of the house and experience life, it would have been a whole other story. But she was at a good age for the whole pandemic.

Paste: And just like me, you said you dove headlong into TCM, or Turner Classic Movies. You were on a Barba Stanwyck kick last time we spoke, so what discoveries have you made since?

Wainwright: Yes. Yes. I continued my educational bent. And speaking of dogs, there’s a movie by Vitorio DeSica, and it’s a movie that he did about a man and his dog, called Umberto D, which is an amazing movie. And we also loved the French actress that was in Jules and Jim, Jeanne Moreau. We went heavy-duty European.

Paste: Jumping from that, sideways, into another film, just the other day, I was watching Judd Apatow’s underrated comedy Knocked Up, and not only was your dad Loudon in it as a doctor, but he sang three incredible songs in the soundtrack, including the folk-classic closing-credits cut, “Gray in L.A.”

Wainwright: Yeah. Well, Loudon has a longstanding relationship with Judd Apatow. He’s been in a couple of his movies, and I think Judd also really considers Loudon to be one of his great idols, you know? He’s like a Beatle for Judd, so that’s a very important relationship for both of them. That’s a very serious thing, and I’m a little envious of their sort of closeness, but, that being said, I totally get it, as well, because it’s a real artistic love affair. And I’ve met Judd, but I think there is actually a, uh….how can I say this? Well, he’s Loudon’s friend, and I have my own posse, and we all love each other. But I wouldn’t really invade that space—I respect that, because they are very close.

Paste: And the point of that is, just the endurance of classic folk, because “Gray in L.A.,” in that simple troubadour style, somehow really sums up the entire conversely modern movie.

Wainwright: Yeah. And that makes total sense. So in a way, we’re all just trying to keep the folk alive. The old folk.

Paste: Ironically, right after Knocked Up, I wound up watching the Coen Brothers’ great Inside Llewyn Davis again, loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. And it really seems to capture that ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene.

Wainwright: I have never seen it. But it’s funny—I used to know Dave Van Ronk! My mom was good friends with him, and we used to sing a lot with him, growing up in the ’80s. He used to hang out at the bar in Saratoga, at Lena Spencer’s cafe. So a lot of that folk stuff? It’s interesting for me, because there are movies that I’ve seen about it, but I wasn’t necessarily drawn to it, because it was sort of my childhood, anyways. But I remember Dave Van Ronk very, very well. He was a real drunk. Which I really liked.

Paste: So what tipped you back into folk at this point?

Wainwright: Well, there are several reasons. One is that my mother’s generation—and I mean, of course, my mother [Kate McGarrigle] has been dead for over 10 years—but that generation is now really starting to dwindle. So I just had a sense of….I dunno, I just really wanted to inhabit that space a little while, while certain members are still around. Like a couple of my aunts and some other people, and just luxuriate in that, in the realness of that, in the moment. And the other thing is that, on a really practical level, my album Unfollow the Rules was nominated for a Grammy, and I hadn’t been nominated for many, many years. So I got into the whole process, for better or for worse, and in doing so realized that there were many, many categories related to Folk, like Roots and Acoustic this, Americana that. And a light kind of went on, and I thought, “Oh, my God! I’m from that world! And I know that music! That is my foundation, so why don’t I just try that?” And yeah, a little bit to win a Grammy, for sure. But at the same time, it was more of a…a deeper calling. But I think also, in terms of now, especially—with all these worries about A.I. and devices controlling everybody’s life, and auto-tuning and the whole thing—I do feel like there’s a need at the moment for real, basic human contact, and this idea of just gathering and being acoustic together. On many levels, and enjoying the here and the now and not worrying if the world is gonna end and whether we’ll survive.

Paste: I think the album’s high point is “Shenandoah,” which is just heart-stirring.

Wainwright: No, that’s an amazing song. And, as I say in the notes, I heard a friend singing it, and I thought, “That melody is just incredible—I have to sing that.” And I think it’s really hard to not sing that song well.

Paste: What was the most difficult one to attempt?

Wainwright: Oh, definitely the Hawaiian song, “Kaulana Na Pua.” And also “Arthur McBride” is very challenging—my version, which I mostly do with the piano. But singing in Hawaiian was a real challenge, and I took it very seriously, because I didn’t want to insult any native people. And I got the stamp of approval, eventually, from some native Hawaiians on the island, in Maui. And they’re tough customers. They are tough customers.

Paste: A remastered, bonus-track, 25th anniversary edition of your debut has also just been released. And the late, great Van Dyke Parks appears prominently on both records, new and old.

Wainwright: Yeah. My friendship with him was incredibly important. I met him in L.A., and he got my tape actually from my dad. And my dad didn’t know him at all, but my dad, I think, was worried about me, because I was drifting, and hanging out with some kind of unsavory people. And I had this odd demo tape, and someone said to my dad, “You know you should give this to Van Dyke Parks—I could see him really relating to what your son is doing.” And sure enough, Van Dyke totally championed me and brought me to Dreamworks, and got me signed, and we worked on my first record. So it was very important for him to be on this album, as well, as a testament to the importance he has in my life, both as a person and as an artist.

Paste: Then there’s the song “Nacht und Traume.” How do you include classical composer Franz Schubert in the folk canon?

Wainwright: Well, Schubert is, in my opinion, the first-ever singer-songwriter. So if you’re gonna talk about Bob Dylan, you have to talk about Schubert, because he was doing it himself over a hundred years earlier. Because he would play the piano and sing his songs, and most of the songs he wrote took him about an hour to compose. So yeah, he was very present and in the now, and I think he was very affected by folk music. Especially in Vienna at that time, there were a lot of folk bands that would play in the streets, and they would play whatever hits were at the opera house, but they would also play folk songs, so it was this wonderful meeting point of different types of music in the empire. So Schubert was a very important figure, with this folk sensibility, shall we say, where someone is singing their own work, alone, for a very intimate audience.

Paste: I like how you plugged in someone with a connection to another, completely different Rufus—Chaka Khan—into your take on “Cotton Eyed Joe.”

Wainwright: You know, she is amazing. I’ve known her for a few years now, and we’ve hung out sporadically, and it’s always a thrill. And I will say that when we got into the studio, there were some moments where I wasn’t sure if it was gonna happen, in the sense that she’s such a force of nature, you know? And I had it all planned out, how I wanted it to sound, and she just did it her way, so there were a few seconds where I was like, “Oh, God—is this not gonna come together?” And it did. And she was right. And that’s what makes her such a powerful force, because Hey—she’s gotta do it her way.

Paste: I talked to Martha again during the pandemic, and she seemed to be thriving up in Canada. But you actually managed to get her together with the whole clan, including your aunt Anna McGarrigle, sister Lucy, and cousin Lily on the album closer “Wild Mountain Thyme.” How did you assemble your mighty Folk-Family Avengers?

Wainwright: Look, there was an idea at the beginning of this process, where maybe I would go up to Montreal for a couple of weeks and really cut a bunch of tracks with the family, but I quickly realized that I didn’t want the album to be about that. I wanted it to be more just my perspective, and from my angle. But with that being said, I knew that deep down, it would be silly if [my family] wasn’t properly represented, as a clan. So I made a sincere kind of call to all of them, and said, “Look—I need you to be on this record, and I’m up in Montreal…” So we recorded the song in Montreal, and they dutifully responded. And I think they would’ve been a little put off if I hadn’t invited them, as well.

Paste: And in doing The Mamas and the Papas’ “Twelve-Thirty,” you tapped into a whole other, later era of folk. With Susanna Hoffs and Sheryl Crow along for the ride.

Wainwright: Yeah. And they’re amazing. And what I like to say after singing that song is that now it’s official—rock is folk. We’ve hit the 50-year mark, so yeah! Let’s start gathering the gems, you know?

Paste: “Down in the Willow Garden,’ with Brandi Carlile, is essentially a classic Appalachian murder ballad. But in traditional overseas murder ballads from England and elsewhere, the location of, say, a “Knoxville Girl,” would often change with where it was being sung, right?

Wainwright: Yeah. It was like the CNN of old. But these cautionary tales, they were necessary. Indescribably sad, but necessary.

Paste: You probably bumped into all sorts of folk legends as a kid, and you never even knew.

Wainwright: No, my mother was the one to recount her experiences and stuff, and she was the one who loved to tell me about hanging out with Pete Seeger, or hanging out with Bob Dylan and really being part of the whole scene. So I heard those great stories a lot. I mean, we grew up basically hanging out a lot with Emmylou Harris, so you’d hear all the Gram Parsons stories, and Linda Ronstadt would come around. So yeah, there were always a lot of stories.

Paste: What were some remarkable things you learned about folk music itself during the Folkocracy process?

Wainwright: Oh, God. Well, I didn’t know that Schubert wrote his songs in one hour—that is a new thing I learned about folk. But I think the discovery of the Hawaiian song was a big deal for me. It really blew my mind, because I didn’t know that there was a battle and such a tragedy connected to the annexation of Hawaii. I wasn’t familiar with that, so it was nice to hear that song interpreted in a folk tradition, another folk setting.

Paste: And as you turn 50 this year, you’ve been delving back into Brecht and Weill?

Wainwright: It’s a week of shows at New York’s Cafe Carlyle [which just ran from May 16 to 20], so I’ve been neck-deep in Weill. And of course, I’ve always been a huge fan of [Brecht and Weill vocalist] Lotte Lenya. But Weill means a great deal to me, and I’m still just really struck by how affected I was by him, growing up, musically and also subject-wise and by just his sensibility. So it’s like coming home in a lot of ways. In fact, I very daringly play a couple of my songs during the show, mainly just to prove just how affected I was, musically, by just how much his style is ingrained into my own musical sensibility.