Rufus Wainwright says that sometimes when he sings he lets his imagination wander.
“Depending on how difficult the piece is, I mean,” he quickly adds. “Sometimes I have to be totally concentrated and really trying to hit the mark. But that being said, I can also often drift into my past and also my hopes for the future.”
Wainwright, whose 11 studio albums contain a unique mix of beautiful, quirky, wistful or romantic songs, comes to the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills for three nights Oct. 30 and Nov. 1-2. He also plays a standalone show at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Nov. 23.
The Wallis dates are essentially hometown shows for the Laurel Canyon resident. With so many friends and family and followers in the area, he fully expects to reminisce a bit as he performs.
“Sometimes, and I think this will probably happen a lot for me over these three days, I think of people in the audience who I know,” Wainwright says. “Like a friend, who maybe our song is about, and I’m there and it makes me just contemplate the relationship.”
Though it doesn’t have to be a friend. It happens with strangers too, he says.
“Maybe there’s somebody I kind of secretly want to impress by secretly singing to just them,” Wainwright says. “In fact, I’ve had a few experiences where someone famous was going to come to my show, but I’m never sure if they’re there or not.
“Then, during the show, I kind of just pretend they’re there as I sing,” he says. “Sometimes they’re just not there. But I enjoy the fact that I could sort of show off a little bit secretly.”
The shows at The Wallis are designed as a unique kind of look back at a career that began with the release of his self-titled debut album in 1998. The Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spective divides his catalog into three categories – Songs of Youth and Addiction, Songs of Love and Desire, Songs of Contempt and Restraint – over three nights.
We spoke before former President Donald Trump played Wainwright’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during a recent town hall as part of a 39 minute-stretch of songs. “Hallelujah” is Wainwright’s best-known song thanks to its inclusion in the soundtrack of “Shrek,” and the singer published an open letter criticizing the use of the song.
In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Wainwright talked about the shows that emerged from the Quarantunes online performances he started during the pandemic, why he avoided the usual full album performances some musicians do to celebrate past work, and how it can be disappointing when you create your very best work.
Q: I understand this grew out of your pandemic practice of playing a song a day on Instagram. What inspired that?
A: Well, I was working a lot right before the pandemic struck. I was about to put out an album, ‘Unfollow the Rules.’ I was actually shooting a video on the day of lockdown, and thankfully we got it in the can that day. So I was just in full-blown work mode. And luckily, my husband [Jörn Weisbrodt], is my manager, so we were able to keep that energy going and just do everything in-house.
Of course, all my tours were canceled, but I don’t know. I just didn’t feel like vegetating. I really wanted to keep working. And it ended up, I hate to say it, kind of a wonderful experience. Because on one hand, I was able to sing every day and keep a connection to my fans, and also help people through this very dark period.
Q: Then you started doing some longer performances, ticketed online shows; did that feed into these retrospective shows?
A: Yeah, we basically did like an album a week, and I revisited all my records. In doing that, I discovered that a lot of the songs which I thought were kind of unattainable, because they were so produced and so kind of lavish in their orchestration, actually sounded quite unique and interesting with a pared-back arrangement.
I enjoyed that, kind of de-composing some of those pieces. Suddenly there were a bunch of songs that I realized I could sing, you know, just alone, which I never thought I could because they were so produced. I revived a portion of my repertoire which I thought was in the past. Then the pandemic ended, and we decided to do it in Paris as a full show. I said the only other place I would do it is L.A.
Q: Can you think of a song or two you realized you could in a pared-down setting?
A: The big one for me is ‘Go or Go Ahead.’ I now perform that alone on the guitar often at shows, but I never believed that that song, which has the biggest rock moment of my career when it breaks into the chorus, would work.
That song and there’s another song, ‘Beautiful Child,’ that I think the arrangement has like 12 guitars playing at the same time or something. Those are the two that stick to me right now.
Q: A lot of performers are doing career retrospectives with full album shows. Why did you decide not to do that with the shows in Paris and now these in L.A.?
A: First of all, I didn’t want to have to do all of my songs. [He laughs] That would have killed me. That would have taken so long. I did want to give a good selection of them, but I didn’t want to do them in chronological order because that to me would just be kind of boring, actually, and a little bit too facile.
It was my husband, Jörn, who came up with the themes. I just gave him a bunch of songs that I liked doing and then he actually divvied them up. He put them in those three categories and then we have these wonderful visuals by Gioele Amaro, who’s becoming quite a very well-known contemporary artist. It’s a nice, sort of classy offering.
Q: What was it like in Paris to play these specific songs in these particular arrangements? What was that feeling like for you?
A: Well, for one thing, and this is all part of the spirit of the exercise, when I went back and examined my career during COVID, I was really pleasantly surprised by how well the songs stand up. I don’t think they’re necessarily, you know, iconic numbers that everybody’s going to be able to hum along to or anything. But I always tried to create these interesting moments and very unusual structures and unique kinds of expression.
That, I think, has paid off, because when you hear the songs you’re like, ‘That’s a really interesting song.’ I think for an audience that’s very rare. You know, everything either has been done 10,000 times or it has to be selling 10,000 billion records in order to get any attention.
So this is sort of somewhere it’s like: ‘You’re going to enjoy this evening because it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’ll require a bit of your attention as well in terms of going on this unusual journey. And there’s some payoff, too. There’s still some big songs in there. But we’re going somewhere.’ [He laughs]
Q: Do you think these three shows will feel different here than they did in Paris?
A: I do feel that L.A. is going to be different because I wrote a lot of these songs in L.A. I made a lot of these records here. I live here now and it’s going to be an intense homecoming. I have chosen the city to be my home, and my career really began here because L.A. understood who I was artistically. So I think it will be a little, how shall we say, a little more touching in a lot of ways to do it here. Because it came from here.
Q: Your latest album, ‘Folkocracy,’ is folk-oriented, and you’ll be playing that on the East Coast soon. You’ve done an album of Judy Garland’s music. You’ve written musicals and operas. What do enjoy from working in so many different forms?
A: Well, look, I’ve always been kind of a culture vulture, and I’m very much inspired by all sorts of things the world has to offer, whether it’s composing my own songs or finding my own music or singing other people’s material. I just need to do that for my sustenance.
That being said, there’s this requiem I composed, which is coming to Disney Hall on May 4. I don’t use this term lightly, but I do think it’s my masterpiece, and I say that with a lot of sadness. Because when you write something like that, you know it could be the top of the heap, which is OK, but it’s also a little sad. And then I’m going to be doing the last of the Judy shows at some point. So we’re wrapping things up here a bit is what I’m trying to say. [He laughs]
Q: Wrapping things up can be wistful or sad, but it also gives you the opportunity to open the next door.
A: There’ll be many. There’ll be many doors to open, yeah.
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