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Pride Of The Clan
08/26/1998 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Eric Broome
Some people are just destined for glory. Sure, the record racks are stuffed with second-generation performers nowadays, but how many of them come from two famous musical parents? Now that Chynna Phillips has become a barefoot Baldwin bride (and since Frances Bean Cobain is still a few years away from her first platinum disc), today's most pedigreed offspring may be Rufus Wainwright, the prodigiously gifted son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle.
"I was never good at anything else," Rufus admits. "I was always a terrible student and always acting up in class, but I was constantly singing and playing piano. Also, with both my parents being in the business, they recognized the signs. The symptoms of Performer's Disease. So it was pretty inevitable."
He was already touring with his mother when barely in his teens, and by the age of 14 had earned a Genie nomination for Best Song In A Film. He spent most of the next several years in Montreal, writing and playing songs in local coffeehouses. Eventually, he was signed to DreamWorks, after his demo tape passed from his father to Van Dyke Parks to label executive Lenny Waronker (also the past producer of artists like Parks, Randy Newman and Brian Wilson).
Wainwright's subsequent recording sessions with producers Jon Brion and Pierre Marchand took up two years in two cities--Montreal and L.A.--sweeping through 14 different studios along the way. After he had committed a whopping 56 songs to tape, he picked out a dozen gems for his self-titled debut album.
The resulting disc has little to do with his parents' gentle whimsy, instead showcasing romantic piano ballads extravagantly decorated with strings, horns, vintage keyboards and oddball percussion. Wainwright's voice is soaring and dramatic, and while his lyrics thoughtfully touch on family, music, personal travels and (especially) doomed love, his melodic gifts are what set him apart. Like Wilson, Burt Bacharach and a select few others, Wainwright has that rare knack for writing a tune which is daringly complex on paper, yet pure bubblegum to the ear.
Irresistible swoons like "Danny Boy," "April Fools" and "Matinee Idol" are sheer joy, while quieter moments like "Foolish Love," "Damned Ladies" and "Millbrook" tap into the same sense of sepia-toned Americana that Parks (who arranged and conducted strings for three tracks) has always mined so well. Meanwhile, chief producer Brion's ear for textural detail lends the songs a vivid, three-dimensional atmosphere. It's a dazzling entrance for a young artist, and quite a conceptual leap from Wainwright's solo coffeehouse days.
"There was a question of whether the album would be just piano and voice," Rufus reveals. "In fact, my father thought that would be much better. Very stark. But since I was doing it with Lenny Waronker, and it was DreamWorks and they had a lot of money, I figured why not go all the way? I didn't want it to be lukewarm and tepid, like, 'Oh, we'll just put a little band or a little drum on here.' I wanted it to be big. A lot of that has to do with my love for opera and classical music, because I adore those arrangements and that whole idea of 'grand opera.' It's big, and not afraid to be brash."
While a song or two does evoke a specific musical era (he describes the lurching "Matinee Idol" as "a Weimar Republic kind of thing"), Wainwright doesn't want to be seen as looking backwards for his stylistic cues. "I don't feel like it's nostalgic, in the sense of wishing for another time. I don't wish that I lived in the 18th century or anything, but I do follow a lot of old rules. I'm into classical music, and those rules have been followed for hundreds of years. Sometimes I feel like I rip off a lot of German chords, like a Mahler chord or a Schubertian kind of thing. I do use old tricks, but they're more musical tricks than something specifically identified with a time period."
The unanswered question is whether such a boldly artistic release can fly commercially. Wainwright knows all about the ups and downs of cult popularity, thanks to his mother and father. Does he hope to achieve the sustained stardom which his parents never quite managed?
"Well, when you sign a record contract with a major label, that's kind of what your job is," he reasons. "That's the agreement. So contractually, I do. And there's a part of me that really does, but there's always a part of you that's frightened. I like to think more in terms of 'That's my job right now,' and I'm going to take a crack at it. So far I can handle it, but once it gets too big, maybe I'll stop. Who knows? But I'm pretty much prepared to go all the way."
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